Some notes in Restful APIs

There are many tutorials describing RESTFUL APIs, but here I would just highlight some of the things that I think they are really important:

• HTTP request and response consists of Header "template based text" and Body "any format". the content type of the body is specified in the header "i.e Content/Type: application/json"
• S = Stateless: means every transaction or request to the server is independent from others

• HTTP verbs:

- GET: a read-only request from the server for a certain URL to retrieve data. But the the client can do some processing on the coming data such as changing the appearance. Body is Empty.

- PUT: mostly used for updating data (with a specified URL i.e id) but also can be used to create data on the server. Body has data.

- Delete: the opposite of put for this specified URL. Body is Empty

- POST: mostly used for creating resources but without a specified URL. Body has data.

• Idempotent methods: whenever they are repeated the result is the same. PUT "the specified url has been updated or created by its ID", DELETE "deleted once, a repetition has no effect as it is already deleted", GET "retrieve the same data as it is a safe operation no data will be changed".

References:

- http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/other/a-beginners-introduction-to-http-and-rest/

- http://docs.couchdb.org/en/latest/intro/api.html