Learning about the RESTful API
Many of you reading this book may already be familiar with web APIs. However, let's review the RESTful API in order to call a web API with Node-RED.
REST stands for Representational State Transfer. RESTful API basically refers to the invocation interface in HTTP of a web system that is implemented according to "REST principles." So, in a broad sense, it's safe to say that the REST API and RESTful API are the same things. So, what exactly is the RESTful API? We will learn the outline and principles of the RESTful API, and the advantages and disadvantages of using the RESTful API, in this section.
REST was proposed by Roy Fielding, one of the HTTP protocol creators, around the year 2000, and is a set (or way of thinking) of design principles suitable for linking multiple software when building a distributed application. In addition, the RESTful API is an API designed according to the following four REST principles:
- Addressability...