Reasons to use a REST API

Representational State Transfer (REST) is a simple stateless architecture style usually running over the HTTP protocol. The idea behind REST is exposing the state of the system as a collection of resources we can manipulate, addressing them by their name or ID. The backend service is responsible for making a resource's data persist, usually through the use of a database server. Clients retrieve the state of a resource performing HTTP requests to the server. The resource can be manipulated and sent back to the server through an HTTP request as well. Resources can be represented in several formats but we will use JSON, a lightweight, human-readable, and widespread interchange format. We can see the manipulation of a resource state a bit like a Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete (CRUD) system. What we are going to do is map each of these operations to a specific HTTP verb. We will perform an HTTP POST request to create a new resource, a GET request to retrieve an existing...