REST (representational state transfer) is a software architectural style that was created to guide the design and development of the architecture for the World Wide Web, so that the client & server can communicate in a standard way.
Introduction
- before 2000, when website for general use started to become available, there was only a fragmented description of web architecture
- later on the W3C work on creating Web’s three primary standards: URL, HTTP and HTML.
- The REST architectural style is designed for network-based applications, specifically client-server applications, coupling between the user agent (client) and the origin server must be as loose as possible to facilitate large-scale adoption
- Web service APIs that adhere to the REST architectural constraints are called RESTful APIs. It uses the HTTP’s GET, POST, PUT and DELETE methods to recover, create, update, or delete resources.
Tips
Unlike SOAP-based web services, there is no “official” standard for RESTful web APIs. This is because REST is an architectural style, while SOAP is a protocol. REST is not a standard in itself, but RESTful implementations make use of standards, such as HTTP, URI, JSON, and XML
Referece: # Exploring Flask REST APIs for Data Engineering: Concepts, Code, and Advantages