Chapter 8. Building RESTful APIs

Representational State Transfer, or REST, is a method of transferring information between a client and a server. On the Web, REST is used on top of HTTP and allows browsers and servers to easily communicate by leveraging basic HTTP commands. By using HTTP commands, REST is platform and programming language agnostic, and decouples the client and the server for easier development. This is typically used in JavaScript applications that need to pull or update user information on the server. REST is also used to provide outside developers with a common interface to user data. For example, Facebook and Twitter use REST in their application program interface (API), to allow developers to get information without having to parse the website's HTML.