REST API
What is RESTful API?
Roy Fielding - The author
REST was defined in 2000 by Roy Fielding and is considerably simpler. It’s not a standard but a set of recommendations and constraints for RESTful web services (or architectural style).
REpresentational State Transfer
- Client-Server - SystemA makes an HTTP request to a URL hosted by SystemB, which returns a response. It’s identical to how a browser works.
- Stateless - REST is stateless: the client request should contain all the information necessary to respond to a request. In other words, it should be possible to make two or more HTTP requests in any order and the same responses will be received.
- Cacheable - A response should be defined as cacheable or not.
- Layered - The requesting client don't need to know whether it’s communicating with the actual server, a proxy, or something else.
RESTful API Style
It is not a RESTfull, but RESTful, that means "REST-like"
Request anatomy
Request consists from:
- endoint
- method
- headers
- data
Endpoint
https://domain.com/user/1/articles?page=3&published=true
domain (+ port)
query string
path
Method (CRUD-operations)
- GET - read
- POST - create
- PUT / PATCH - update
- DELETE - delete
Headers
- Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true
- Access-Control-Allow-Methods: PUT, DELETE
- Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://example.org
- Cache-Control: private, no-cache, must-revalidate
- Connection: Keep-Alive
- Content-Type: application/json
- Set-Cookie: test=1; domain=example.com; path=/; expires=Tue, 01-Oct-2013 19:16:48 GMT
Data (JSON)
{
"name": "John Doe",
"age": 33,
"articlesNumber": 120,
"active": true,
"city": null
}