Understanding REST APIs

REST stands for Representational State Transfer, which is simply an architectural philosophy that is implemented while designing APIs. Web application APIs following the REST style are referred to as a REST API. For example, GitHub's Developer API is a REST API since it follows REST style.

Now let's go through a few concepts of REST APIs.

REST API concepts

These are some concepts that we need to understand before we get started with testing REST APIs:

• URIs

• URI format

• Resource modeling

URIs

REST APIs make use of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) to access resources.

For example, https://api.github.com/users/PacktPublishing.

This format is very easy to understand and is readable to a normal human being. Here, it is understandable that the client is requesting data of the user, which is PacktPublishing in this case.

URI format

The generic URI syntax as defined in RFC 3986 is shown as following:

URI = scheme "://" authority "/" path [ "?" query ] [ "#" fragment ]

We are interested...