Introduction to APIs - RESTful APIs

REST stands for Representational State Transfer.

Here is a short summary of the REST principles:

• Uniform Interface: Every rest architecture must have a standardized way of accessing and processing data resources. This includes unique resource identifiers (i.e., unique URLs) and self-descriptive messages in the server response that describe how to process the representation (for instance JSON vs XML) of the data resource.
• Stateless: Every client request is self-contained in that the server doesn’t need to store any application data in order to respond to subsequent requests.
• Client-Server: There must be both a client and server in the architecture.
• Cacheable & Layered System: Caching and layering increases networking efficiency.

Why RESTful are stateless?
It might appear easier to design a server that isn’t stateless. There is a reason why RESTful web servers are not allowed to remember anything about the previous requests that the user has sent. In short, stateless servers make your applications scalable.

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What exactly is RESTful programming?

Best practices for REST API design