RESTful APIs

REST, called as Representational State Transfer, is an architectural software style defining a set of rules and conventions for building web services.

REST is based on resources. Just like boxes in a warehouse, there are news in web sites, there are images in lots of places, there are products on e-commerce platforms. They are the basis of the platforms and they are called Resources. Resources are named with nouns, not verbs naturally. In RESTful services, a resource may have more than one Representations as well

The problem is not just building resources but accessing them as well. If you have resources,  you need to have a way to differentiate, access and manipulate it like pointers or handlers.

RESTful Services universally identifies and accesses those resources through URIs globally. If a URI brings you different things each time then it’s not a URI, URI should be global.

Also, if a URI does not point to a resource, it’s not a URI. You can share it, you can save it, you can index it.

RESTful services provides for the API’s with the following features;

• Flexibility
• Discoverability
• Predictability

Basically, RESTful services exposes the entities in your Domain Model as resources and universally identify them.