As the Internet matures, REST (representational state transfer) APIs are emerging as the most reliable design pattern for web APIs. An API is described as RESTful if it follows these guiding principles:
- The API is designed as a set of resources. For instance, the GitHub API provides information about users, repositories, followers, etc. Each user, or repository, is a specific resource. Each resource can be addressed through a different HTTP end-point.
- The URLs should be simple and should identify the resource clearly. For instance,
api.github.com/users/oderskyis simple and tells us clearly that we should expect information about the user Martin Odersky. - There is no world resource that contains all the information about the system. Instead, top-level resources contain links to more specialized resources. For instance, the user resource in the GitHub API contains links to that user's repositories and that user's followers, rather than having all that information embedded in the user resource directly.
- The API should be discoverable. The response to a request for a specific resource should contain URLs for related resources. When you query the user resource on GitHub, the response contains the URL for accessing that user's followers, repositories etc. The client should use the URLs provided by the API, rather than attempting to construct them client-side. This makes the client less brittle to changes in the API.
- There should be as little state maintained on the server as possible. For instance, when querying the GitHub API, we must pass the authentication token with every request, rather than expecting our authentication status to be remembered on the server. Having each interaction be independent of the history provides much better scalability: if any interaction can be handled by any server, load balancing is much easier.
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