Pets Back End Concepts

Learning objective: By the end of this lesson, students will understand RESTful APIs.

REST APIs

A web API (application programming interface) is an interface that facilitates communication between clients and resources. An API acts as an intermediary between two applications; for instance, allowing a front end to communicate with a server and send back requested data.

As APIs have become increasingly prevalent and designed for consumption, various API protocols have been established to help provide users with a set of defined rules and expectations. One of the most popular of these API protocols is REST.

REST, short for REpresentational State Transfer, is a guiding architectural style for web applications, focusing on the client-server relationship. It’s a set of principles that simplifies how web resources are defined and addressed. RESTful APIs are both developer-friendly and intuitive to users, given that their structure is broadly understood and uniform.

For this lesson, we’ll be creating a RESTful API that handles CRUD of a Pets resource. Using restful routing conventions, we can expect the following: