REST
Representational state transfer (REST) is a software style for creating web services. A RESTful web service allows the requesting system to access and manipulate textual representations of resources by using a uniform and predefined set of stateless operations.
Resources
There are two types of resources: collection and member. A member resource is a single resource that the system will manipulate. A collection resource is a collection of members in which a single operation can be applied to all members of the collection.
RESTful API
When applied to web services, the following actions should be taken for each API endpoint.
| HTTP Method | on Collection | on Member |
|---|---|---|
| GET | Retrieve the URIs of each member resources in the collection | Retrieve the member resource |
| POST | Create a new member resource in the collection | None |
| PUT | Create or replace all members in the collection | Replace the member resource |
| PATCH | Update all members in the collection | Update the member resource |
| DELETE | Delete all members in the collection | Delete the member resource |