An overview of REST
Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural structure designed to make it simple to connect systems across the internet using existing standards and protocols. The purpose of REST is to help define a uniform set of stateless operations that can be performed between systems. A basic driving principle behind a RESTful API is that it should use the standards that form the basis of the internet, that is, the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), to allow for resources to be accessed and data transferred between systems in a simple and repeatable manner.
In general, RESTful APIs require a descriptive Uniform Resource Locator (URL) to identify the resource we are working with, a standard HTTP method to indicate what action is being performed, and a media type description to describe the format of the data being transferred or the required format for data being returned.
Ideally, the URI for a RESTful API is a clean URL, or a user-friendly URL. This...
