Introduction

Representation State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style that the web was built on. More specifically, the HTTP 1.1 protocol standards were built using the REST principles. REST provides a representation of a resource. URLs (Uniform Resource Locator) are used to define the location of a resource and tell the browser where it is located.

A RESTful API is a web service API that adheres to this architectural style.

The most commonly used HTTP verbs or methods are: POST, GET, PUT, and DELETE. These methods are the basis for persistent storage and are known as CRUD operations (Create, Read, Update, and Delete).

In this chapter, the recipes will be focused on building a RESTful API using the REST architectural style with ExpressJS and Mongoose.