What is REST?

Representational state transfer (REST) is an architectural design for designing communication and operational channels among networked applications. The REST design is commonly implemented while building web HTTP APIs. As REST APIs interact through HTTP requests, they provide heterogeneous interoperability. RESTful APIs are best used when a single web page has to show data from multiple partners. Let's take the example of a website that hosts movie reviews. There could be multiple sections powered by different partners on any review page on that site. These can be ad partners to display ads, third-party recommendation plugins to recommend similar movie reviews to the user, and social media plugins for comments, discussions, and to share the movie review with their friends. This is only possible due to smooth interaction between various services; implementing a RESTful API makes it more transparent.

In this section, let's begin by building a RESTful API that will allow an external...