· 7 years ago · Sep 17, 2018, 11:48 PM
1I'm not sure about the links you provided, but here's a quick summary of RESTful APIs. If you want a full technical breakdown, please google some great tutorials that are out there. A RESTful API is a simple yet powerful way to communicate with a resource API. It uses the full functionality of the HTTP protocol to create a common architecture for these APIs. All URI endpoints are considered to be resources (ie, /users). Actions are NEVER included in the URI (ie, /users/add IS BAD). Instead, HTTP methods are used to specify different actions on a single URI. For example, GET /users would return a list of all records in the USERS table, whereas POST /users would be used to add a new record to the USERS table. RESTful APIs don't particularly care about the content type of the messages being passed, although in practice they predominantly use either JSON or XML. The content type does need to be specified by the server, because obviously it can only handle the content types it's configured for, I just mean that the specification doesn't care. There's way, WAY more too it, but that's some of the basics. After a two second look at one of the links you provided, I do not believe that API is RESTful, but please don't take that opinion as fact, since I really have not investigated it deeply. The URIs discussed on that page seem action-oriented, rather than resource-oriented. However, that brings up the final piece about REST: in many cases, it's not perfect. There is a very clear, beautiful, elegant standard out there that I encourage you to study, but just because the standard exists doesn't mean that everyone follows it perfectly.