Rest API Tutorial – A Complete Beginner’s Guide

A RESTful API, widely used for software application communication, follows specific rules and standards to facilitate data exchange over the internet using HTTP requests, typically in JSON format. REST APIs are favored for their simplicity, scalability, and flexibility, allowing for stateless interactions and uniform interfaces that decouple clients from servers, enabling independent evolution. While offering benefits such as platform independence and efficient performance through caching, they face challenges like larger requests due to statelessness, potential security issues, and complex versioning. The blog provides a step-by-step guide on creating a basic RESTful API using Node.js and Express, covering essential HTTP methods like GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE, and emphasizes the importance of testing and monitoring APIs with tools like Moesif, which offers analytics, tracking, and monetization capabilities to enhance API management and usage.