Introduction to RESTful API Development

In order to get the best from any technology, it is necessary to understand deeply what the technology does. Throughout this chapter, RESTful concepts will be explained in detail with necessary elements to help you to develop and run RESTful services. The main objective of the chapter is to show you comprehensive examples that transpose these concepts to real-world scenarios and help you to understand their definitions in an easier way.

Currently, there is a huge necessity for applications to scale when necessary; they need to be fast, secure, portable, and trustable. These applications no longer serve one specific purpose; in fact, they work to solve corporative issues and meet the needs of end users.

APIs are the core elements for creating web and mobile applications. They provide structured data for your applications. This chapter mainly focuses on the definition of Representational State Transfer (REST) and RESTful principles, and describes the primary logic behind these architectural principles as well as the standards to follow while creating a web service.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• The REST definition
• RESTful styles
• The general concepts regarding REST 
• HTTP methods and verbs