In the early days of the Internet, the websites and applications were standalone as they had no means of communicating with each other. Each application was like an island that had to collect and store every piece of data it could possibly need to get the job done.
Today, almost everyone in the world connects to the Internet through notebooks, cell phones, or tablets. Therefore, applications should be able to communicate with each other so that users can access any information they need from their cell phones, notebooks, or any other device.
Each application that communicates with the external world must provide an API (Application Programming Interface) to specify how the applications will interact. However, having an API is not enough. We still need HTTP to transport the data.
How did the need for building APIs and using HTTP as the transportation layer lead to REST?
REST, which stands for Representational State Transfer, is a style or pattern for creating consistent APIs. Thus...