Many developers use and build REST APIs without understanding what makes them RESTful. So what actually is REpresentational State Transfer? Moreover, why is it important that an API is RESTful?
There are some key architectural constraints to an API being RESTful, the first of these is being stateless in nature.
RESTful APIs are stateless; the client's context is not stored on the server between requests.
Suppose you create a basic PHP app that has login functionality. After validating the user credentials that are put into the login form, you may then go ahead and use a session to store a state of the logged in user as they proceed to their next state to carry out the next task.
This is unacceptable when it comes to a REST API; REST is a stateless protocol. The ST in REST stand for State Transfer; the state of a request should be transferred around rather than merely stored on the server. By transferring sessions instead of storing them you avoid having sticky...