What Are RESTful APIs?
When you start learning about APIs, another term soon appears alongside them: RESTful API. At first, it may seem like a different kind of technology, but REST is really just a style or set of rules for how an API should work. To understand RESTful APIs, it helps to first think about what a regular API is.
A regular API is any system that lets one program talk to another. You send a request, the system does some work, and you receive a response. The design and format of the requests and responses can vary widely depending on how the API was built. Some APIs use custom commands, some use XML, some use remote procedure calls, and some may require complex setup. There are no universal expectations for how a traditional API should behave, and that can sometimes make things confusing for developers.
A RESTful API, on the other hand, follows a set of predictable guidelines called REST, which stands for Representational State Transfer. REST is not a programming language or a tool. Instead, it is a design approach that focuses on simplicity, consistency, and the use of standard web technologies. RESTful APIs rely heavily on HTTP, the same protocol that powers websites. That means the same methods your web browser uses, like GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE, are also used by RESTful APIs.
The biggest difference between a regular API and a RESTful API is that RESTful APIs treat data like resources. Each resource has its own address (also called a URL), and you interact with it in a consistent way. For example, if you were requesting information about a user with an ID of 10, the RESTful API might provide a URL like:
https://api.example.com/users/10
If you send a GET request to that address, you are asking to read that user’s information. If you send a DELETE request to the same address, you are asking to remove that user. You do not need a different command or special function. The HTTP method itself tells the server what you want to do. This is one of the key principles of REST: the rules stay consistent, and the meaning is clear from the structure of the request.
Let’s look at a simple example. Suppose you are building an app that displays a list of books. A RESTful API for this system might use URLs like:
GET https://api.mybooks.com/books
This would return a list of all the books. To add a new book, you might send:
POST https://api.mybooks.com/books
The body of the request would include details like the title and author. To request a single book, maybe the one with ID 42, the request might be:
GET https://api.mybooks.com/books/42
The response would return that book’s information. No custom commands, no strange formats, and no guessing. You always know what you are working with because the API follows the same structure every time.
RESTful APIs quickly became popular because they are easy for both humans and machines to understand. They work cleanly with the web, they scale well, and they avoid unnecessary complexity. Developers don’t have to learn a new system for every API they use. If they understand the REST principles once, they can apply that knowledge almost anywhere.
All RESTful APIs are APIs, but not all APIs are RESTful. Regular APIs can follow any design the developer chooses, but RESTful APIs follow a consistent, web-based approach built around resources and standard HTTP methods. This makes them easier to use, easier to read, and easier to build upon. For beginners, RESTful APIs are one of the best places to start because the structure is predictable and the concepts will serve you well in many future projects.
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