Let’s say you’re trying to find videos about Batman on Youtube. You open up Youtube, type “Batman” into a search field, hit enter, and you see a list of videos about Batman. A REST API works in a similar way. You search for something, and you get a list of results back from the service you’re requesting from.
An API is an application programming interface. It is a set of rules that allow programs to talk to each other. The developer creates the API on the server and allows the client to talk to it.
REST determines how the API looks like. It stands for “Representational State Transfer”. It is a set of rules that developers follow when they create their API. 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 you is called a response.
It’s important to know that a request is made up of four things:
