"ResT" in the context of a software Application Programming Interface (API) stands for "Representational State Transfer". Like many software design patterns, ReST is a pattern , not an implementation . Before we dig deep into ReST though, let us talk about APIs in general. When we in the QA/test world talk about APIs, we usually mean APIs exposed to users in order to manipulate software systems efficiently from the outside. These are public-facing APIs, as opposed to internal APIs set up at boundaries between disparate subsystems within the application itself. There are any number of public facing API schemes that are not ReST. SOAP is still widely in use. CORBA was a pioneer design in public APIs. AJAX (Asyncronous Javascript And XML) is an API that enables things like sliding maps in a browser. And applications may have their own proprietary public APIs: the Salesforce API is a notable example; while similar to SQL and some other things, the Salesforce API is unli...
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