RESTful API

Most applications and popular websites provide a REST application programming interface (API) these days. Amazon, Netflix, Twillio, and thousands of companies have a public-facing interface that has become a significant part of their business growth.

A RESTful API is a web service API that adheres to the REST architectural properties. Due to its simplicity and flexibility for a variety of use cases such as mobile applications, it has become a de facto standard in the industry for programmatic interfaces.

There are six architectural constraints of a pure RESTful system, and these are, as follows:

• Client-server: Mandates that client and server must be separate and allowed to evolve independently
• Stateless: Requires REST calls to be stateless, that is, client context is not stored on the server but at the client
• Cacheable: Specifies that responses must define themselves to be cacheable or not, which can improve scalability and performance
• Layered system: Forms a hierarchy that helps manage...