REST APIs

REST (Representational State Transfer) APIs are a type of web service that follows certain architectural principles and constraints to enable communication between different systems over the internet. REST APIs are designed to be lightweight, scalable, and platform-independent.

The key features of RESTful APIs are:

1. Client-Server Architecture: The client and server are decoupled from each other, and both can evolve independently.

2. Stateless: The server does not maintain any client state. Each request from the client contains all the information necessary to complete the request.

3. Cacheable: Responses from the server can be cached to improve performance.

4. Layered System: RESTful APIs are organized in layers, allowing for scalability and flexibility.

RESTful APIs use HTTP  as the underlying protocol for communication between the client and server. HTTP methods like GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, PATCH, and others are used to perform specific operations on resources exposed by the API. The response from the server is typically in the form of JSON or XML.

Example

Operation	Path	HTTP Method
Create a Customer	/customers	POST
Get a Customer	/customers/123	GET
Get all Customers	/customers	GET
Update a Customer	/customers/123	PUT
Remove a Customer	/customers/123	DELETE

Overall, RESTful APIs provide a flexible and scalable way to communicate between different systems over the internet, and they are widely used in modern web applications, mobile apps, and IoT devices.