What is REST API and Principles

 What is REST API

The term REST stands for REpresentational State Transfer. It is an architectural style that defines a set of rules in order to create Web Services.

Principles of REST API

Well, there are six ground principles laid down by Dr. Fielding who was the one to define the REST API design in 2000. Below are the six guiding principles of REST:

Stateless

The requests sent from a client to a server will contain all the required information to make the server understand the requests sent from the client. This can be either a part of URL,  query-string parameters, body, or even headers. The URL is used to uniquely identify the resource and the body holds the state of the requesting resource. Once the server processes the request, a response is sent to the client through body, status or headers

Client-Server

The client-server architecture enables a uniform interface and separates clients from the servers.  This enhances the portability across multiple platforms as well as the scalability of the server components.

Uniform Interface

To obtain the uniformity throughout the application, REST has the following four interface constraints:

• Resource identification
• Resource Manipulation using representations
• Self-descriptive messages
• Hypermedia as the engine of application state

Cacheable

In order to provide a better performance, the applications are often made cacheable. This is done by labeling the response from the server as cacheable or non-cacheable either implicitly or explicitly. If the response is defined as cacheable, then the client cache can reuse the response data for equivalent responses in the future.

ayered system

The layered system architecture allows an application to be more stable by limiting component behavior.  This type of architecture helps in enhancing the application’s security as components in each layer cannot interact beyond the next immediate layer they are in. Also, it enables load balancing and provides shared caches for promoting scalability.

Code on demand

This is an optional constraint and is used the least. It permits a clients code or applets to be downloaded and to be used within the application. In essence, it simplifies the clients by creating a smart application which doesn’t rely on its own code structure.

Now, that you know the principles behind REST API, next let’s look into the Methods of REST API.

Methods of REST API

All of us working with the technology of the web, do CRUD operations. When I say CRUD operations, I mean that we create a resource, read a resource, update a resource and delete a resource. Now, to do these actions, you can actually use the HTTP methods, which are nothing but the REST API Methods. Refer below.