Overview
The importance of REST APIs is growing with the rise of cloud-based services, which require components from everywhere in the world to communicate quickly and efficiently. REST APIs are also called RESTful Web services.
REST APIs
REST, or Representational State Transfer, is an architectural style to develop web services. The development team follows a set of rules when they create the API( Application ProgrammingInterface). One of these rules states that you should be able to get a piece of data (called a resource) when you link to a specific URL. Each URL is called a request, while the data sent back to the user is called a response.
The REST server exposes various services in a REST application, and client applications access those services. It uses the HTTP protocol, so the REST client and server communicate via HTTP. The data exchanged between the client and server can be in different formats like plain text, XML, JSON, Protobuf, etc. A REST client requests and sends back the data in the appropriate format.