Back in 2012 Dries wrote a blog post declaring that the future was a "RESTful Drupal." In all previous versions of Drupal there were competing methods of implementing REST APIs in Drupal: services, RESTWS and RESTful were the more popular ones in contrib. This lead to other modules having to target one implementation or another in order to work. You could end up finding the functionality you wanted to leverage already built, but using a different set of APIs than you had already implemented. The goal of the Drupal 8's Web Services Initiative was to consolidate the basic REST functionality and allow Drupal to serve as the content repository for any number of clients, and not just the Drupal interface. This allows Drupal to expose content and functionality to anything from mobile applications, other CMS and platforms, and single-page applications...
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