Is there a term in REST vocabulary describing the HTTP server?

Question

Considering these REST resources:

http://foo:123/bar/baz
http://foo:123/bar/boz
http://foo:123/bar/buz
http://nirwana:99/abc
http://nirwana:99/def

Resource groups 1 to 3 and 4 and 5 share the same network endpoint (host and port). Is there a term specific to REST denoting this? Or is this just a special type of "container"?

Answer 1

From the Uniform Resource Identifier standard (RFC3986) section 3...

The generic URI syntax consists of a hierarchical sequence of
components referred to as the scheme, authority, path, query, and
fragment.

  URI         = scheme ":" hier-part [ "?" query ] [ "#" fragment ]

  hier-part   = "//" authority path-abempty
              / path-absolute
              / path-rootless
              / path-empty

[...]

The following are two example URIs and their component parts:

     foo://example.com:8042/over/there?name=ferret#nose
     \_/   \______________/\_________/ \_________/ \__/
      |           |            |            |        |
   scheme     authority       path        query   fragment
      |   _____________________|__
     / \ /                        \
     urn:example:animal:ferret:nose

...so they use the term "authority".

A quick look at Roy Fielding's dissertation which originally defined the concept of REST seems to indicate that he uses the same term, which is not all that surprising, since he was also one of the authors of RFC3986. ;-)

Answer 2

REST is architectural style independent on HTTP. From other side, REST is architectural style that can be partly applied on HTTP. Note the difference: HTTP is protocol and REST is architectural style. So you cannot find an answer inside Roy's dissertation, but you can take terminology introduced by URI RFC, and I would recommend this.