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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.
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.
API description languages are sometimes called interface description languages (IDLs). The structured description might be used to generate documentation for human programmers ; such documentation may be easier to read than free-form documentation, since all documentation generated by the same tool follows the same formatting conventions.
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.
An example of a popular web API is the Astronomy Picture of the Day API operated by the American space agency NASA. It is a server-side API used to retrieve photographs of space or other images of interest to astronomers, and metadata about the images. According to the API documentation, [15] the API has one endpoint:
HuffPost Data Visualization, analysis, interactive maps and real-time graphics. Browse, copy and fork our open-source software.; Remix thousands of aggregated polling results.
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 ...