Chapter 7. RESTful API Building

An API, or Application Programming Interface, can be summarized as a developer's interface to the application. Just like end users have a visible frontend user interface to work on and talk to the application, developers also need a user interface to the application. REST, or REpresentational State Transfer, is not a protocol or a standard. It is just a software architectural style or a set of constraints defined for writing applications and aims at simplifying the interfaces within and outside the application. When web service APIs are written in a way to adhere to the REST constraints, then they are known as RESTful APIs. Being RESTful keeps the API decoupled from the internal application details. This results in ease of scalability and keeps things simple. The uniform interface ensures that each and every request is documented.

Note

It is a topic of debate whether REST is better or SOAP is. It actually is a subjective question as it depends...