What are REST APIs? How it is used? The complete understanding guide for REST APIs.

What are REST APIs? How is it used? The complete understanding guide for REST APIs.

Representational State Transfer (REST) ​​APIs, also known as RESTful APIs, are becoming an increasingly popular design style. REST APIs are built to leverage existing protocols in the most commonly used environments over HTTP for Web APIs. REST API design is known for providing greater flexibility in providing lighter and more modern business connections.

REST APIs Work

What are REST APIs?

APIs stands for application programming interface and are used to bring applications together with the goal of performing a designed function built around sharing data and executing predefined processes. Basically, it allows one software to talk to another software. There are two most common APIs from there REST APIs are the most commonly deployed forms of an API, the other being a Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) API.

REST is a client-service architecture that is based on a request and response design. REST APIs are becoming more and more popular as part of a web services approach. Developers use RESTful APIs to make requests and receive responses via HTTP functions.

Detail of REST API

How Do REST APIs Work?

The REST API works like any web page. The call is made from the client-side to the server side and the data is retrieved via HTTP.

 If the person was an engineer, instead of "www" they would type "graph.facebook.com/youtube" and get a recovery. for API requests made through their browser. The results of the application will display structured data, organized by key-value parameters. By following the YouTube page as an example, this organized data will include how much you like the page, how many accounts you follow the page, etc.

 Another important concept in the world of REST API settings. When you submit a REST API request, someone may have the option to narrow down the search request. This solves the question about keyword pairs and filters the data obtained from the answers. The REST settings specify the dynamic part of the device i.e. the data you are working with.

Other types of methods:

 SettingsAPI, application (most common types), themes, and cookies. The path parameter is a flexible part of the URL path and identifies a specific resource in the data. The question parameter is found at the end of the URL and can be required or optional. The main parameter is added as part of the HTTP API subject header. A cookie option is required if the REST client needs authentication using cookies.

HTTP Request Method:-

As mentioned above, REST APIs are designed to make requests and receive responses via HTTP functions. Here are the five HTTP commands that REST is based on.

GET Request-

GET Request is a null command to safely retrieve information. No matter how many times you repeat this with the same parameters, the result is always the same.

POST Request-

The POST request is used to request the origin server to accept the object included in the request as a new subresource. You can also update existing entities.

PUT and PATCH Requests-

PUT requests are idempotent commands that can create, update, or replace objects. A PATCH request is also an idempotent command that simply replaces an entity.

DELETE Request-

DELETE request is an idempotent command to delete a resource. One important detail to note is that the resource does not need to be deleted immediately. It can also be an asynchronous or long-running request.

Here I am showing a simple example - 

Imagine writing a small piece of code that displays the current weather conditions of your home. Reads temperature, humidity, and rainfall and stores them locally. Then how do you present this information in a way that can be viewed on your website or other application?

One answer to this question is to wrap it in a RESTful API. You can provide code and wrap it with an API so that whenever you say

http://localhost:8000/api/ weather stats will give you a JSON response with all current weather statistics.

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Why are we doing this? 

Improved Code Reuse Exposing code via REST APIs inherently provides more flexibility. We can develop the software once, and if we want to reuse the same code in another project, we just need to send one HTTP request to the API, which reduces the need for duplicate work. 

Always-available REST API works properly and is always available. We make them very reliable and therefore we can interact with them from anywhere as long as we have an internet connection.