REST was initially created as a guideline to manage communication on a complex network like the internet. Representational State Transfer (REST) is a software architecture that imposes conditions on how an API should work. In addition, APIs help them to determine which clients get access to specific internal resources. Organizations use APIs to share resources and provide web services while maintaining security, control, and authentication. The machine that gives the resource to the client is also called the server. Resources can be images, videos, text, numbers, or any type of data. Resources are the information that different applications provide to their clients. Or you can access the same data from your browser when you visit the weather website directly. For example, developers can write programs that access weather data from a weather system. The client can be a person or a software system that uses the API. ClientsĬlients are users who want to access information from the web. You can think of a web API as a gateway between clients and resources on the web.

When it receives this information, it internally processes the employee's timesheet and returns the number of hours worked in that date range. For example, the timesheet application exposes an API that asks for an employee's full name and a range of dates. Developers expose or create APIs so that other applications can communicate with their applications programmatically. An application programming interface (API) defines the rules that you must follow to communicate with other software systems.

Sap ariba rest api