The REST API
The objective of the REST API is to interact with the shopping cart from the user interface in the browser. The main interactions are as follows:
- Creating the cart
- Adding, removing, and updating products in the cart
We will design our API by following REST architecture principles which was defined in 2000, by Roy Fielding.
Note
A formal description of the REST API can be found in Fielding Dissertation, CHAPTER 5, Representational State Transfer (REST), at http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm.
The main principles of the architecture are as follows:
- It is based on client-server architecture, which means that a server can serve multiple clients.
- It should be stateless—the server should not keep any context between client calls. The context should be kept by the client. All of the information required for the processing on the server should be part of the message sent.
- As no context is kept on the server, it should be possible to cache responses at the server...