REST (Representational State Transfer) is web standards based architecture and uses HTTP Protocol. A REST Server simply provides access to resources and REST client accesses and modifies the resources using HTTP protocol. REST uses various representations to represent a resource like text, JSON, and XML but JSON is the most popular one.
Why do we need RESTful Web Services?
REST is an architecture style for designing networked applications. REST is a lightweight alternative to mechanisms like RPC (Remote Procedure Calls) and Web Services (SOAP, WSDL, et al.). The World Wide Web itself, based on HTTP, can be viewed as an REST-based architecture. The entire modern web browsers are REST client. RESTful applications use HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE) to perform CRUD operations.
Advantages:
- Simple
- Easy to use/implement
- Easy to build
- Uniform interface
- The REST API is always independent of the type of platform or languages
- Visible, reliable, and scalable
Why opt Node JS for building RESTful APIS?
Node.js is a powerful JavaScript framework built on Google Chrome’s JavaScript V8 Engine. It is used to develop I/O intensive web applications like video streaming sites, single-page applications, etc. Node.js development is open source and used by thousands of web developers around the world.
Advantages:
- Quick & easy development
- High performance
- Run on single thread to handle multiple concurrent requests
- Easy to write API and interaction code
- Streaming support
- Monitoring possibilities
- Authentication support
- Lightweight, fast, and scalable
About Express JS:
Express is a flexible Node.js web application framework that provides a robust set of features to develop mobile and web applications. It facilitates the rapid development of Node based Web applications.
Few core features of Express framework −
- Allows setting up of middleware to respond to HTTP Requests.
- Defines a routing table which is used to perform different actions based on HTTP Method and URL.
#nodejs #expressjs #restful api #api
