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REST (Representational State Transfer) is a software architectural style that was created to guide the design and development of the architecture for the World Wide Web. REST defines a set of constraints for how the architecture of a distributed, Internet-scale hypermedia system, such as the Web, should behave.
There are two previous major description languages: WSDL 2.0 (Web Services Description Language) and WADL (Web Application Description Language). Neither is widely adopted in the industry for describing RESTful APIs, citing poor human readability of both and WADL being actually unable to fully describe a RESTful API.
An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. [1] A document or standard that describes how to build such a connection or interface is called an API specification.
The Resource Oriented Architecture, as documented by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby in their 2007 book RESTful Web Services, [3] gives concrete advice on specific technical details. Naming these collections of guidelines "Resource Oriented Architecture" may allow developers to discuss the benefits of an architecture in the context of ROA.
A server-side web API consists of one or more publicly exposed endpoints to a defined request–response message system, typically expressed in JSON or XML. The web API is exposed most commonly by means of an HTTP-based web server. Mashups are web applications which combine the use of multiple server-side web APIs.
The RMM can be employed to determine how well a Web service architecture adheres to REST principles. It categorizes a Web API into four levels (from 0 to 3) with each higher level corresponding to a more complete adherence to REST design. The next level also contains all the characteristics of the previous one. [4] [5]
A user-agent makes an HTTP request to a REST API through an entry point URL. All subsequent requests the user-agent may make are discovered inside the response to each request. The media types used for these representations, and the link relations they may contain, are part of the API. The client transitions through application states by ...
Restful Objects also defines a standard set of resources for accessing or manipulating these representations. The specification defines which HTTP methods may be used with each resource, and their meaning. The table below shows a partial summary: