Instructor: Our next web API is REST
which is the star of this course, actually.
So, what is REST?
REST is also an acronym.
In this case, it stands for Representational State Transfer.
Yes, that is quite complicated, I know,
and we'll explain it later.
REST was designed in the year 2000 by Roy Fielding
and it is based on URL + JSON.
You won't see here XML, or complex envelopes
or anything like it.
It is quite simple.
You send to URL, and you get back JSON.
REST is a message style protocol,
meaning, we are not calling a specific method or procedure.
We are just calling a URL and passing him message.
The URL endpoint should be able to understand
what to do with this message
and then pass it along and return us the response.
As mentioned earlier,
REST is the De Facto Standard for APIs.
Almost all the major websites today
expose REST API and you are expected to use it.
And, of course, we'll talk about it a lot later.
So, we'll go on.