RESTful API: Why Is It Still the Standard for Web APIs?

Imagine walking into a fine restaurant. You raise your hand, and a waiter comes to take your order along with your table number. The waiter delivers the request to the kitchen, and a few minutes later returns with the dish you asked for. You don’t need to know how the kitchen works, you only care that your order arrives correctly. Meanwhile, many other waiters are serving many other tables at the same time. If this sounds familiar, it’s because this is a common analogy used to explain how APIs work. In the world of software, an API acts much like the waiter in this story. The client sends a request describing what it needs, the server processes that request, and then returns the result. The client does not need to understand the internal implementation of the server, only how to communicate with it. One of the most widely used approaches for building web APIs today is the REST architecture style. REST leverages the widely adopted HTTP protocol to standardize how clients request resourc