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REST

Representational State Transfer, or simply REST, is the dominant pattern across enterprise API operations because of its simplicity and use of the HTTP protocol. REST provides a foundational and ubiquitous way for making digital resources and capabilities available across the widest possible range of developers in the desired applications and integrations. REST brings a common set of characteristics that can be easily applied across hundreds or thousands of APIs.

Elements

  • HTTP - RESTful APIs are built on top of the same technology that brings us the World Wide Web, making them a low-cost and widely understood transport protocol for making digital resources to developers across almost any programming language.
  • Uniform - Delivering uniform interfaces for consumers makes onboarding and integration of RESTful APIs much easier for API consumers. They can readily apply the value represented in the enterprise API catalogs they have access to.
  • Resources - REST focuses on uniformly defining digital resources, providing the raw ingredients that can be used in digital applications. It provides the vocabulary developers need for delivering meaningful use cases.
  • Methods - RESTful APIs take advantage of HTTP methods to help standardize the actions you can take with the digital resources defined, providing a common vocabulary for complementing resource-oriented nouns with useful verbs.
  • Synchronous - By using HTTP, RESTful APIs, you emulate the web, allowing applications and integrations to make requests for digital resources and wait until they receive a response, providing users what they need at the moment.
  • Stateless - Simple APIs using a RESTful pattern do one thing and do it well, without requiring wider awareness of the state of the application making the API call. They leave the state of the user experience to be defined by the application in question.
  • Cacheable - Since RESTful APIs use HTTP, they can benefit from the capability of web documents, significantly improving the performance of applications that may be requesting data, content, and other media that may not change very often.
  • Simple - Simple - REST works as an API pattern because it is simple, making digital resources, capabilities, and experiences available to consumers in a way that can be discovered, understood, and put to use with the least amount of work possible.

REST does have limitations. It won’t be the right solution for every project, but it does provide the essential baseline for API operations. REST APIs are a natural evolution of the web, but instead of making digital resources and capabilities available to humans via a browser, they make these same digital resources available via mobile and desktop applications. They also allow other systems to use these resources in different types of automated applications and integrations.