Roy Thomas Fielding (born 1965) is an American computer scientist[1], one of the principal authors of the HTTP specification, an authority on computer network architecture[2] and co-founder of the Apache HTTP Server project.
Fielding was born in Laguna Beach, California. In 1999, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.[3] He received a doctorate from the University of California, Irvine in 2000.
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Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures, Fielding's doctoral dissertation, describes Representational State Transfer (REST) as a key architectural principle of the World Wide Web, and received a large amount of attention. People now frequently hold up REST as an approach to developing Web services[4], as an alternative to other distributed-computing specifications such as CORBA. Fielding has also been heavily involved in the development of HTML and Uniform Resource Identifiers. Fielding was a co-founder of the Apache HTTP Server project[5][6] and was a member of the interim OpenSolaris Boards until he resigned from the community in 2008 disappointed that Sun would not let the community influence development decisions.[7] He was the chair of the Apache Software Foundation for its first three years and remains a member of its board of directors. Currently he works as chief scientist at Adobe Systems in San Jose, California.[8]
He describes himself as "...part Maori, Kiwi, Yank, Irish, Scottish, British, and California beach bum..."[9][10][11]