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API is short for: Application Programming Interfaces. It's a communication platform to exchange data between computer systems.

REST API

An API is a set of rules that lets programs talk to each other, exposing data and functionality across the Internet in secure and consistent format.

REST stands for: Representational State Transfer. This is an architectural pattern that describes how distributed systems can expose a consistent interface. When people use the term ‘REST API’, they are generally referring to an API accessed using the HTTP protocol at a predefined set of URLs.

These URLs represent various resources returned in a JSON format. Often resources have one or more methods that can be performed on them over HTTP, like:

  • GET (a list of item),
  • POST (insert a new item),
  • PUT (update an item),
  • and DELETE (delete and item).
The action represented by the first and last of these is clear, but POST and PUT have specific meanings. How they are defined is confusing, but the general rule is: use POST to create resources, and PUT to update resources.