https://prestd.com

Everywhere you look, you seem to encounter the term "RESTful API", which has started getting traction and becoming the main architecture when working with APIs.

So, what is a RESTful API, and more importantly, why should you care?

Introduction

To first have an "official" meaning of the term, we'll refer to our old friend, Wikipedia:

Representational state transfer (REST) is a software architectural style that was created to guide the design and development of the architecture for the World Wide Web.

REST defines a set of constraints for how the architecture of an Internet-scale distributed hypermedia system, such as the Web, should behave.

The REST architectural style emphasises the scalability of interactions between components, uniform interfaces, independent deployment of components, and the creation of a layered architecture to facilitate caching components to reduce user-perceived latency, enforce security, and encapsulate legacy systems.

REST has been employed throughout the software industry and is a widely accepted set of guidelines for creating stateless, reliable web services.

…

Any web service that obeys the REST constraints is informally described as RESTful.

Now, What Is An API?

An API is a set of definitions and protocols for building and integrating application software.

It's sometimes referred to as a contract between an information provider and an information user — establishing the content required from the consumer (The Request) and the content needed by the producer (The Response).

The Architectural Constraints Of A RESTful API Software Structure

1. Client—Server Architecture

It's also known as a Separation Of Concerns (SoC) Architecture

This is what we refer to when splitting the Front-End and Back-End entirely so that they are both agnostic of the technologies that each other is using.

2. Statelessness

This means that each request is individual to any other and no session data is retained in the event following the finalization of a request, and no context is needed for a request to take place.

This constraint's benefit is that it vastly reduces the server load.

3. Cacheability

One more constraint specific to RESTful APIs that further improves the performance of a Backend System and its scalability.

Cacheability is particularly beneficial as we may temporarily store the response of a call to avoid redundant data being sent repeatedly.

4. A Layered System

A layered system that organizes each type of server (those responsible for security, load-balancing, etc.) involved in the retrieval of requested information into hierarchies invisible to the client.

A crucial benefit of this constraint is the ease of adding a layered security system on top of the specific application's business logic to ensure everything is secure and the risks of successful attacks against the server/s are significantly mitigated.

5. Code On Demand (Optional)

Servers can temporarily extend or customize the functionality of a client by transferring executable code: for example, compiled components such as Java applets or client-side scripts such as JavaScript.

6. A Uniform Interface

The Uniform Interface constraint is fundamental to the design of any RESTful system.

It simplifies and decouples the architecture, which enables each part to evolve independently.

The four restrictions of the Uniform Interface are:

1. Resource identification in requests — Individual resources are identified in requests, for example, using URIs in RESTful Web Services. The resources are conceptually separate from the representations returned to the client. For example, the server could send data from its database as HTML, XML, or JSON — none of which are the server's internal representation.
2. Resource manipulation through representations — When a client holds a representation of a resource, including any metadata attached, it has enough information to modify or delete the resource's state.
3. Self-descriptive messages — Each message includes enough information to describe how to process the message. For example, which parser to invoke can be specified by a media type.
4. Hypermedia as the engine of application state (HATEOAS) — Having accessed an initial URI for the REST application — analogous to a human Web user accessing the home page of a website — a REST client should then be able to use server-provided links dynamically to discover all the available resources it needs. As access proceeds, the server responds with text that includes hyperlinks to other resources that are currently available. There is no need for the client to be hard-coded with information regarding the structure or dynamics of the application.

Any web service API that adheres to these six constraints is classified as a REST/RESTful API.

With the recent uprising in popularity of the MERN, MEVN, and MEAN Tech Stacks, Architectures such as SoC, MVC, and RESTful API, as well as many others, have started seeing a spike in popularity.

Despite their popularity, which can be seen mainly with the aforementioned Tech Stacks, these software architecture techniques will also come in handy with different Tech Stacks.

Conclusion

Apart from the benefits outlined so far, a RESTful API Architecture provides plenty of benefits that improve the scalability, performance, and deployment speed of application development, provide improved IoT scalability and connectivity and improve the technological development in all domains of Technology.

I hope you liked this story.

Cheers!