REST API

Acronym: IT

The REST API is an application programming interface created in 2000 by computer scientist Roy Fielding. A REST API is an API that follows REST design principles or an architectural style of representational state transfer that provides a relatively high level of flexibility and freedom for developers. This flexibility is just one of the reasons why REST APIs have become the standard way to connect components and applications in a microservice architecture. For this reason, REST APIs are sometimes referred to as RESTful APIs. REST APIs communicate via HTTP requests to perform standard CRUD (read, update, and delete) operations within a resource. For example, a REST API will use a GET request to retrieve a document, a POST request to create it, a PUT request to update a record, and a DELETE request to delete it. API calls can use all HTTP methods.