REST APIs

This chapter delves into the heart of web application communication — REST APIs. In today’s connected digital world, effective communication between different applications is paramount, and RESTful APIs play a pivotal role in facilitating this interaction.

We start by exploring the basic fabric of the web: HTTP. We touch on the core HTTP methods, such as GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE, to see how they carry out Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) operations in a RESTful context. We then turn our attention to HTTP status codes — the system’s way of informing clients about the status of their requests — and HTTP headers.

Since APIs evolve and managing these changes without disrupting existing clients is a significant challenge, we’ll look at different strategies for API versioning and the trade-offs involved with each.

Then, we learn about the Data Transfer Object (DTO) pattern. Packaging data into DTOs can provide many...