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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.
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.
The RESTful Service Description Language (RSDL) is a machine- and human-readable XML description of HTTP-based web applications (typically REST web services). [1]The language (defined by Michael Pasternak during his work on oVirt RESTful API) allows documenting the model of the resource(s) provided by a service, the relationships between them, and operations and the parameters that must be ...
A Web API is a development in Web services where emphasis has been moving to simpler representational state transfer (REST) based communications. [2] Restful APIs do not require XML-based Web service protocols (SOAP and WSDL) to support their interfaces.
API use can vary depending on the type of programming language involved. An API for a procedural language such as Lua could consist primarily of basic routines to execute code, manipulate data or handle errors while an API for an object-oriented language, such as Java, would provide a specification of classes and its class methods.
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 ...
Code on demand (COD) is the only optional constraint in REST. It allows clients to improve their flexibility because it is the server which decides how certain things will be done. For instance, with code on demand, a client can download a Javascript, Java applet or even a Flash application in order to encrypt communication so servers are not ...
Clean URLs also do not contain implementation details of the underlying web application. This carries the benefit of reducing the difficulty of changing the implementation of the resource at a later date. For example, many URLs include the filename of a server-side script, such as example.php, example.asp or cgi-bin. If the underlying ...