RESTful APIs, orRepresentational State Transfer APIs, operate based on a set of principles that define how web standards, such as HTTP and URLs, should be used. RESTful APIs are stateless, meaning each request from a client to a server must contain all the information necessary to understand and respond to the request. The server does not store any client context between requests.
Key characteristics of RESTful APIs include:
Resource-Based: Everything in REST is a resource. Users, products, orders, etc., are all resources represented by URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers).
Client-Server Architecture: The client and server should be separate, with the client making requests to the server to access or modify resources.
Stateless: Each request from the client to the server must contain all the information needed to understand the request, and cannot take advantage of any stored context on the server.
Cacheable: Responses from the server must explicitly state whether they can be cached or not.
Uniform Interface: This simplifies and decouples the architecture, which enables each part to evolve independently. This includes a consistent use of HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) to perform operations on resources.
Example: Imagine a simple e-commerce application. To get a list of products, a client might send a GET request to the URL https://example.com/api/products. The server processes this request and returns a JSON response containing the list of products.
For deploying and managing RESTful APIs, cloud platforms like Tencent Cloud offer services such as Tencent Cloud API Gateway, which provides a stable and efficient API hosting service, supporting the entire API lifecycle management, including creation, publishing, monitoring, and security management.