What is a REST API vs an API?

What is a rest api used for?

REST API are frequently used in mobile and web applications to access and change data on remote systems across the Internet. Some use cases of the rest api are as follows:

What is a RESTful API?

RESTful API is an interface that computer systems leverage to exchange information securely over the internet. Most business applications have to communicate with internal and third-party applications to perform various tasks.

For example, to generate monthly payslips, your internal accounts system shares data with your customers’ banking system to automate invoicing and communicate with an internal timesheet application. RESTful APIs support this information exchange as these APIs follow secure, reliable, and efficient software communication standards.

REST API Endpoints

Endpoints in a REST API are unique URLs representing data objects. Requests are directed to these endpoints using HTTP methods such as GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE. When a client requests a specific endpoint, the server sends back the current version of the requested data in JSON or XML formats.

The rest api endpoint is usually a URL that includes server and resource names where the request is being made. For instance, example.com/users is an endpoint that consists of the server name (www.example.com) and the resource (user). A resource is any object that has a name and associated properties. Resource examples include users, locations, and more.

How do REST APIs work?

The working process of the REST API is as follows:

Step 1: The client sends an HTTP request to the server using a suitable method (GET, POST).

Step 2: Server receives the request, processes it according to its logic, and accesses the required resource.

Step 3: The server generates a response containing the requested status information.

Step 4: The client receives the response and processes it accordingly.

REST APIs work without saving any information from previous requests. As such, each request must include every detail the server needs to handle. This approach makes REST APIs easier to scale and more reliable.

Best Practices of REST API

REST has been widely adopted as a popular architecture style for developing APIs. Let us dive into REST API best practices that are widely accepted by developers:

1. Pagination

The data for a resource can be huge, resulting in clients fetching volumes of data when only a subset of the data is required. But by allowing pagination of data, only a specific volume of data is passed on with each response. As a result, clients can make requests for more data.

2. Versioning

Versioning is a practice to easily manage changes and updates to an API, while also maintaining compatibility with other versions of the API for clients. Here are some common API versioning approaches:

3. Caching

Caching is a REST API practice to return data to local memory. This practice saves you from querying the database every time while retrieving data as requested by a user. You can change the way in which data is cached as per your needs.

4. Idempotency

In RESTful web services, idempotency is a practice of making the same API request many times to produce the same result as making it just once. When designing the REST APIs, you must realize that consumers can make mistakes. Consumers can write the client code in such a way that there can be repeated requests coming to the APIs. These duplicate requests can be due to timeouts and network issues. You must make sure that APIs are fault-tolerant so that duplicate requests do not leave the system unstable.

REST API Examples

RESTful API are used a lot in web and mobile apps. They help you get or change data in other systems. Here are some real-world examples:

As we explored the above examples of RESTful API, let us see a JSON response from a REST API with user profile details and a tweet as follows:

For instance, a developer requests the Twitter API to collect a user profile. The API responds with user data, such as their name, profile, follower count, and recent tweets. The client application can then show this information in a mobile app or website. This exchange happens through API integration projects, allowing systems to communicate seamlessly.

When a client requests a resource like a user profile in the above example, the API does not just send raw data. It structures the response in a format that the client can understand and work on. The common format is JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), yet the API also returns XML or even HTML in some cases.

Hence, REST API enables clients to interact with resources in a stateless manner. Each request contains everything needed, and the response provides the recent resource state at that moment.

Common REST API commands

Four methods are commonly used in a REST-based Architecture, i.e., GET, POST, PATCH, and DELETE, to perform read, create, update, and delete (CRUD) operations.

Get /users/1

POST /users
{
 "name": "Anjali",
 "email": "1@gmailcom"
}

DELETE /users/1

Conclusion

Effective testing ensures that REST APIs perform as intended, with reliability, efficiency, and security. Test automation tools like ACCELQ provide comprehensive support for executing and verifying REST APIs. To dive deeper, explore our guide on Testing RESTful Services in ACCELQ and learn the basic flow of testing RESTful services.