What is REST API

Question

When I was learning when I was connecting mongoDB with node.js, I cam across the term RestAPI. Can anyone tell me what is it and how should I use it?

Answer 1

Well let us break the word and understand it one by one

• API (Application Programming Interface): It is a code which is allows the communication between your applications and other applications
• REST (Representational State Transfer): It is an API that allows you to access or manipulate the resource, using a set of predefined operations through HTTP protocol methods
• So Finally REST API’s are the API’s used to send the request using HTTP protocol to any application/server and receive the response in form of JSON data
• A good Example of REST API is - The World Wide Web (WWW) is an example of a distributed system that uses REST protocol architecture to provide a hypermedia driven interface for websites.
• You use these REST API’s to fetch data from a database via your application
• For this it uses HTTP methods like GET, PUT, POST, DELETE and more to work data present in database
• You can even test the working of these API’s using a tool called POSTMAN

To know how to perform queries using REST API and test them using POSTMAN have a look at this link: https://youtu.be/JiBtwxCm2bo