Whenever an engineer hears the word API, REST, the acronym for Representational State Transfer, is undoubtedly one of the first words that springs to mind. Indeed, the vast majority of online services and applications that people use on a daily basis are using a REST API to communicate with the backend servers.
The proliferation of what we commonly refer to as RESTful APIs is indeed not coincidental. REST, as an architectural style for building applications for the web, offers quite a few enticing advantages over alternatives such as the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP):
- Ease of interaction: A web browser or a command tool such as curl is all that is required to interact with REST endpoints
- The majority of programming languages ship with built-in support for performing HTTP requests
- It is quite easy to intercept...
