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An application that adheres to the REST architectural constraints may be informally described as RESTful, although this term is more commonly associated with the design of HTTP-based APIs and what are widely considered best practices regarding the "verbs" (HTTP methods) a resource responds to while having little to do with REST as originally ...
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.
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.
In other words, an API connects software entities together. Unlike a user interface, an API is typically not visible to users. It is an "under the hood" portion of a software system, used for machine-to-machine communication. [4] A well-designed API exposes only objects or actions needed by software or software developers.
While REST is a set of architectural guidelines applicable to various types of computing infrastructures, Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA) is only coupled with the web. This architecture is therefore useful mostly to businesses that consider the web as the computing/publishing platform of choice.
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 ...
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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: