Now that you know what an API is, let's talk about a specific kind of API, the Representational State Transfer (REST) API. Many current web services use this architectural style for their APIs. While which underlying protocol needs to be used is not defined, in most cases, it will be HTTP—the same protocol you use when you surf the web with a web browser.
Using REST, resources on the web are modeled in an object-oriented way—each resource has a unique URL, which can be used together with one of the underlying HTTP methods (often called verbs) to perform stateless operations on resources. Stateless means that the server will not remember any of your prior requests—each request ...
