What are the RESTful services?

So let’s start by thinking about what RESTful services actually are. Have a look at the Images. you see we have two clients, a laptop and a smartphone,
and we have the three applications you probably all know, Google Maps, Facebook, and Twitter. The question is what’s the common ground here?

Well, all these applications can be accessed from different devices. Neither Google Maps nor Facebook or Twitter are only accessible via the browser on your notebook or a smartphone app. All these services are exposed to different devices.

Now as you are probably also aware, all these services live from the data they store on the internet or they can fetch from servers, so the solution certainly is a device. Instead, what is used here is a RESTful API, or some sort of API to which the different devices, or applications running on those devices, can reach out in order to fetch data, or store data, or do whatever they have to do. This underlines the importance of such APIs, and why it’s a good thing to know how to build something like that. This course, of course, specifically is about RESTful services, which according to this definition provides a uniform,

standardized access with clear request requirements and response structure. This of course means that RESTful services allow us to know
which data they will receive so that the server is able to handle this data, and that they provide a clear and standardized response, which can
be handled by different applications accessing the service.