REST Concepts

REST (Representational State Transfer) is an architectural style for building scalable web services. It uses simple HTTP requests to perform CRUD operations (Create, Read, Update, Delete) on resources.

Resources

In REST, a resource is any piece of data or entity that you want to expose through your web service. Think of resources as objects in the real-world customers, products, orders, etc.

Each resource is exposed via a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier).

For example,

This URI might represent the user with ID 101.

HTTP Methods

RESTful APIs use standard HTTP methods to define what action should be performed on a resource. These map directly to CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations.

For example,

• POST /api/products to create a product
• DELETE /api/products/1 to delete product 1

Status Codes

When a RESTful API processes a request, it responds with an HTTP status code to indicate success or failure. Clients use these codes to understand the result and handle it accordingly.