REST API Tutorials: BUILD REST API and White-Label Services, Right Way to API Development, REST API EXAMPLES
Create REST API with Most Trending Technology - PHP, PYTHON, GO, NodeJS and Most trending frameworks - Django, Laravel, Lumen, GIN
REST is acronym for REpresentational State Transfer. RESTful API is an architectural style for an Application Program Interface (API) that uses HTTP requests to access and alter data. That data can be used to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE data types, which refers to the reading, updating, creating and deleting of operations concerning resources. For More Details
The main functions used in any REST-based architecture are:
- GET − Provides read-only access to a resource.
- PUT − Creates a new resource.
- DELETE − Removes a resource.
- POST − Updates an existing resource or creates a new resource.
Your application must satisfy certain constraints or principles. Let's go into details about these principles.
There are six ground principles, below are the six guiding principles of REST:
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Stateless: Requests sent from a client to the server contains all the necessary information that is required to completely understand it. It can be a part of the URI, query-string parameters, body, or even headers. The URI is used for uniquely identifying the resource and the body holds the state of the requesting resource. Once the processing is done by the server, an appropriate response is sent back to the client through headers, status or response body.
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Client-Server: It has a uniform interface that separates the clients from the servers. Separating the concerns helps in improving the user interface’s portability across multiple platforms as well as enhance the scalability of the server components.
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Uniform Interface: To obtain the uniformity throughout the application, REST has defined four interface constraints which are:
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. It 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. It also helps in preventing the reuse of the stale data.
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Layered System: The layered system architecture allows an application to be more stable by limiting component behavior. This architecture enables load balancing and provides shared caches for promoting scalability. The layered architecture also helps in enhancing the application’s security as components in each layer cannot interact beyond the next immediate layer they are in.
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Code on Demand: Code on Demand is an optional constraint and is used the least. It permits a clients code or applets to be downloaded and extended via the interface 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 what is a REST API and what all you need to mind in order to deliver an efficient application, let’s dive deeper and see the process of building REST API using all trending technologies and Frameowrks.
REST and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) offer different methods to invoke a web service. REST is an architectural style, while SOAP defines a standard communication protocol specification for XML-based message exchange. REST applications can use SOAP.
RESTful web services are stateless. A REST-based implementation is simple compared to SOAP, but users must understand the context and content being passed along, as there's no standard set of rules to describe the REST web services interface. REST services are useful for restricted profile devices, such as mobile, and are easy to integrate with existing websites.
SOAP requires less plumbing code meaning low-level, infrastructural code that connects main code modules together than REST services design. The Web Services Description Language describes a common set of rules to define the messages, bindings, operations and location of the service. SOAP web services are useful for asynchronous processing and invocation.
Very easy to create REST API in couple of minutes, you can choose any of the above code base according to your language and framework preferences and follow instructions to create REST API.
Happy Coding 👍
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