REST Flashcards

1
Q

What does the acronym REST stand for? What makes a service “RESTful”?

A

REST is an acronym for REpresentational State Transfer and an architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems.

Restful Web Services is a lightweight, maintainable, and scalable service that is built on the REST architecture.

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2
Q

What protocols and data format do REST services use?

A

REST structures data in XML, YAML, or any other format that is machine-readable, but usually JSON is most widely used.

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3
Q

What are the architectural constraints of REST?

A

Client-server architecture
Statelessness
Uniform Interface
Layered system
Cacheability
Code on Demand

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4
Q

Explain the levels of the Richardson Maturity Model

A

Level 1 tackles the question of handling complexity by using divide and conquer, breaking a large service endpoint down into multiple resources.
Level 2 introduces a standard set of verbs so that we handle similar situations in the same way, removing unnecessary variation.
Level 3 introduces discoverability, providing a way of making a protocol more self-documenting.

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5
Q

Explain the HATEOAS concept

A

HATEOAS, or Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State, is a complicated-sounding term for a simple idea: A client interacts with a REST API entirely through the responses provided dynamically by the server.

Put even more simply: You shouldn’t need any documentation or out-of-band information to use a REST API.

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6
Q

What is a “resource” in a REST service?

A

A resource in REST is a similar Object in Object Oriented Programming or is like an Entity in a Database. Once a resource is identified then its representation is to be decided using a standard format so that the server can send the resource in the above said format and client can understand the same format.

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