An Overview of REST and RESTful APIs

What Are RESTful APIs?

RESTful APIs are those that adhere to a set of guidelines and best practises when creating new APIs.

Too soon?

What Are APIs?

APIs, which stand for Application Programming Interface, are a collection of guidelines and procedures that a computer can follow to exchange data between two or more services that are operating concurrently or independently. Additionally, APIs can communicate with most programming languages, including Java, C++, C#, Java Script, and others, for the Frontend and Backend.

Consider a restaurant as an example in this case.

When you visit, you tell the waiter what you would like to order. The waiter then brings your order to the cook, who is informed of your preferences and must wait for the food to be prepared before returning the food to the table to be served.

As you can see, in this example, the cook (backend) gets the ingredients from the storage room (database) and gives the food (data) to the waiter, who then gives the client a preview of the data. The customer (client or frontend) requests specific resources (data), and the waiter (our API) responds.

Also, Read Types of APIs In Web Application Development

That’s all for the APIs.

To preserve the integrity of the programme, developers and APIs must now abide by certain guidelines, directives, or standards while creating them.

Additionally, these constraints are known as REST, or representational state transfer, and they include:

Uniform Interface: This denotes that data is transferred by the server using a common format.

Statelessness: This denotes that each request is made independently of the others.

Layered System: This describes the situation where a new layer appears in between the database, front end, and/or back end.

Cacheable: Adding data to the server-side or client-side cache allows the hit ratio in the code to be lowered.

Code on Demand: This approach states that changes to the code may be made without interfering with the operation of other code segments, should they be necessary.

We can thus declare that the APIs are RESTful if they adhere to these REST restrictions.

For more information about our API development services or project-related inquiries, email us at erp@oodles.io.