Understanding RESTful Web Services: A Complete Guide

Today we use mobile applications for everything, whether it is watching a video, booking a cab, or ordering food from the restaurant.
In eCommerce applications, we search/filter and get results, do you want to know how applications fetch results and updates your input to the server? How all this works and what happens behind the scenes?
The answer is – RESTful Web Services

Table of Contents

What is REST?

REST is the Representational State Transfer, more importantly, it is an architectural style or an approach for communication between the client and your server.
Sometimes it is also known as the Language of Internet.

In simple words,
A client-side server cannot communicate directly with a web server, so they need a communication bridge to talk to servers.
That communication bridge is known as API (Application Programming Interface), which connect your client with the server via HTTP Protocol using REST Principles, and a bunch of this process is known as RESTful Web Services or REST API.

Why Should We Use RESTful Web Services?

The main reason, which encourages you to use REST is: Separation of Client and Server

Separation of Client and Server: REST APIs can separate your User Interface(UI) with your data storage which improves your loading time.

Scalability: Due to the separation of client and server, your development team can easily scale your project without any problems.

Stateless: REST APIs are stateless, so there is no dependency on any other calls

Cache: Due to stateless nature, overhead on API calls can occur, that’s why REST encourage you to write cacheable APIs

No installation: You don’t need to install anything on client-side to use REST API

Flexible formats: REST Provides you the ease of format flexibility for both Options: JSON or XML

Ease of Use: It’s easy to learn due to its uniform interface

Conclusion

REST is just a set of standards for your API designs. Following these standards improves your API design and makes it up to the industry standards. Any developer who knows how to use REST can scale and work on APIs.
This is just an introductory explanation about REST. Stay connected to know how we can implement REST and the best practices of REST API Designs in the next blog posts.