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Back to Basics - RESTful APIs The most common standard used by...
Sahn Lam@sahnlam
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Dec 23, 2023
~1 min read
Back to Basics - RESTful APIs
The most common standard used by mobile and web applications to communicate with backend servers is called REST, which stands for Representational State Transfer.
REST is not an official specification, but rather a loose set of rules that have become the predominant method for building web APIs since the early 2000s. An API that follows REST principles is called a RESTful API.
A RESTful API organizes data into resources, each with its own unique URI (Uniform Resource Identifier). The URI differentiates between different types of resources hosted on a server.
Clients interact with a resource by making HTTP requests to its URI endpoint. The URI comes before an HTTP verb that tells the server what operation to perform:
POST - Create a new resource
GET - Read data about a resource
PUT - Update an existing resource
DELETE - Delete/remove a resource
You may have heard this referred to as CRUD - Create, Read, Update, Delete.
This simple yet powerful pattern has made it the standard for API development across mobile and web.
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The most common standard used by mobile and web applications to communicate with backend servers is called REST, which stands for Representational State Transfer.
REST is not an official specification, but rather a loose set of rules that have become the predominant method for building web APIs since the early 2000s. An API that follows REST principles is called a RESTful API.
A RESTful API organizes data into resources, each with its own unique URI (Uniform Resource Identifier). The URI differentiates between different types of resources hosted on a server.
Clients interact with a resource by making HTTP requests to its URI endpoint. The URI comes before an HTTP verb that tells the server what operation to perform:
POST - Create a new resource
GET - Read data about a resource
PUT - Update an existing resource
DELETE - Delete/remove a resource
You may have heard this referred to as CRUD - Create, Read, Update, Delete.
This simple yet powerful pattern has made it the standard for API development across mobile and web.
–
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get a Free System Design PDF (158 pages): bit.ly/496keA7
