One of the most important concepts in distributed architecture is REST. The importance of it and how to comprehend RESTful services in theory and practise are explained here.
How will web servers and clients communicate is a crucial concern, and REST, or Representational State Transfer, is the pervasive architectural style that provides the crucial solution. REST is one of the most popular acronyms used in the field of software engineering. One of the most frequently misinterpreted things is this one. REST is briefly explained in this article, covering both theory and application. In other words, we’ll examine both REST theory and its practical application, which primarily takes the form of RESTful APIs.
REST in theory
The process of creating software that will be disseminated over the Internet is inherently difficult. Although the protocols stop there, the TCP/IP and HTTP stack provide us with a fundamental method for transmitting data over the wire. For organising how resources will be packaged and distributed via web apps, software developers had to come up with our own higher-level strategies.
Roy Fielding began this introduction to REST with a thorough breakdown of the advantages and disadvantages of alternative web designs at the turn of the century. He came to the conclusion that networked systems’ complexity was difficult to manage and that there needed to be a mechanism for developers to maintain positive qualities like scalability, stability, and performance without compromising simplicity.
As an architectural response to the difficulty of delivering software over the Internet, Fielding then put forth REST. His suggestion may be summed up in the following way: Components should send their internal state in a uniform, implementation-neutral style. To put it another way, a web architecture should be made up of independent parts that communicate via a common protocol. Even if it was applied to a vast issue space, this was just smart design. Fielding, though, had a more focused idea:
The name “Representational State Transfer” is intended to evoke an image of how a well-designed Web application behaves: a network of web pages (a virtual state-machine), where the user progresses through the application by selecting links (state transitions), resulting in the next page (representing the next state of the application) being transferred to the user and rendered for their use.
Web sites and links are prominently featured in that description, as you’ll see. Hypermedia, particularly HTML, and hyperlinks were originally referred to as REST. A web service essentially hosts resources at different URIs and URLs. An HTML page is returned by the service in response to a user request for a resource. The procedure continues since the website has links that can be utilised to access other information. Many of the objectives of good software architecture are supported by this perspective, including standard interfaces, stateless components, cacheable resources, and services that may be combined or layered.
REST-based APIs
The REST methodology that is most often used today does not function as intended. Instead, software is often distributed online by developers via an HTTP API and JSON. For this reason, a so-called REST architecture is frequently referred to as RESTful, meaning that it is REST-like.
In the RESTful style, a client makes a resource request using a normally structured URL (a RESTful API), and gets a customarily formatted JSON answer in return that uses key/value pairs to describe the requested resource.
The defining traits of contemporary RESTful web applications are the traditional URLs and JSON answers. In this design, the HTTP verb explains how to manage an object while the URL route specifies where it is located. For instance, if your API offers information about music, your endpoint URL can be musicservice/albums/1234, where 1234 is the asset ID. A JSON document for that asset will be returned in response to a GET request made to that endpoint, looking something like this:
Listing 1. A simple RESTful service
Response:
{
id: 1234,
name: “Abbey Road”,
band: “The Beatles”,
year: 1969,
best_song: “Come Together”
}
Listing 1 demonstrates how the endpoint responded with information describing the asset. This complies with the demand that the service keep implementation details a secret. The other verbs allow you to change the resource (HTTP PUT), create a new one (HTTP POST), or delete it (HTTP DELETE).
The API’s structure is flexible. The basic guideline is that GET requests should be idempotent, or incapable of changing anything. A list of albums would frequently be returned by a GET call to the musicservice/albums endpoint. As part of the URL, the endpoint would additionally enable filter and/or query parameters, such as this one:
musicservice/albums?band_name=”pink_floyd”&years=”1973-1980”&sort=alphaThe representation of resources deviates from consistency as the API becomes more complicated. Say that our MusicService API allows you to categorise albums by category or style. You might link an album to a tag or a tag to an album. The strategy of a RESTful API frequently comes down to personal taste and style. The most important rule is to be as consistent as you can. In order to make it simple for someone creating API code to complete their task, you want the URL syntax to be consistent.
RESTful design is the norm these days when the term is mentioned. Clients are created using one of the many accessible JavaScript frameworks. In single-page apps, requests in the Ajax style are frequently utilised to power fine-grained interactions. Because they issue standardised forms, services (up to and including microservices) are created utilising a variety of tech stacks. In order to respond to queries in a uniform and interoperable manner, services created in this style can interact with one another.
SOAP vs. REST
Theoretically, REST is a self-describing service architecture in which clients are aware of the standards and the service generates data that complies with them. The client can essentially continue without being aware of the service structure. The Remote Procedure Call, or RPC, form of client-service relationship lies at the other end of the spectrum. In this paradigm, the client and the server sign a legal agreement outlining the specifics of their interactions. They then interact in a manner akin to local code procedure calls. RPC converts network calls into the function calls used in regular programming.
RPC offers certain benefits since it is more rigorous and encourages planning, as well as having clearly defined services and clients. The rigidity of RPC is a drawback. Each time a client or server changes, the other must follow suit, and this includes the contract’s defining mechanism.