REST

Explaining REST

Source (article): How I explained REST to my brother

• Who is Roy Fielding?
  • Roy Fielding helped write the first web servers, and later went on to explain why the web works how it does. He is largely attributed with the HTTP protocol that is widely used on the internet today.
• Why don’t the techniques that we use today work well when we need to be able to talk to all of the machines in the world?
  • Most of the techniques that were developed after Fielding started building the web were designed to talk to small number of other computers.
• What is the HTTP protocol that Fielding and his friends created? The created HTTP itself, with the ability to use common ‘verbs’ to talk to machines around the world: GET, POST, PUT, and PATCH.
• What does a GET do?
  • Retrieves information from another machine.
• What does a POST do?
  • Adds information to another machine.
• What does a PUT do?
  • Replaces information in another machine.
• What does a PATCH do?
  • Updates information in another machine.

API Key scavenger hunt

• Geocoding API
  • Acquired.
• Weather Bit API
  • Acquired.
• Yelp API Docs
  • Acquired.
• The Movie DB API Docs
  • Acquired.

Thing I want to know more about

I’m still not totally clear what is means to be “RESTful” in web development. Does it just mean conforming to common HTTP protocols and practices?