Building a REST API

REST, or ReST, is an acronym for Representational State Transfer, which is an architecture for client machines to request information about the resources that exist on a remote machine. API stands for Application Programming Interface, which is a set of rules and protocols for interacting with application software running on different machines. The interaction of different software entities is not a new requirement. In the last few decades, there have been many technologies proposed and invented to make software-level interactions seamless and convenient. A few noticeable technologies include Remote Procedure Call (RPC), Remote Method Invocation (RMI), CORBA, and SOAP web services. These technologies have limitations in terms of being tied to a certain programming language (for example, RMI) or tied to a proprietary transport mechanism, or using only a certain type of data format. These limitations have been almost entirely eliminated by the RESTful API, which is...