Regardless of the size or purpose of your new service or app; you are going to want it put together using the best tools and techniques available. Key to the success of any app is its ability to communicate with other apps using APIs. These come in several types, one of the most important of which are RESTful APIs. You might not know what these are or how they work; but they will be essential to the safety and security of what you create. For that reason, you need to be aware of how useful they are and when you should use them. Clearly, you will have developers to do the coding for you; but as this app could shape the future of your business; it is only common sense that you know at least the basics of how it works.

What are RESTful APIs?

In short, RESTful APIs (REpresentational State Transfer Application Programming Interfaces) are web development tools used to allow communication between different software applications over the internet. You might think of them as a path along which the apps exchange data. As you can probably guess, this has plenty of uses.

Requesting information with RESTful APIs

This is what a RESTful API is most commonly used for and probably where it will be utilized in your project. It will request and retrieve information from external services. For example:

• Your webpage wants to display NFL scores to users, so by interacting with a sports API, you can get the data you need and present it to users.
• Your trading app needs up-to-date currency prices, so you can display those prices for your users by interacting with a financial or news app.

RESTful APIs are useful here because they are versatile enough for this variety of functions; making it easy to display the real-time information you need without constantly retrieving and updating it yourself.

Sending information with RESTful APIs

While, as already mentioned, you are most likely to be using RESTful APIs for retrieving data, this is not the full extent of what they can do. They can also be used to communicate with servers to send data as well. These files do not have to be limited to football scores or currency prices. It can be different-sized images or text files, making them ideal for use in a bespoke in-house platform where data of different types must be securely shared. So, your users could just as easily send in the latest sales figures or share holiday pictures on your app.

A few final thoughts

You don’t need to know everything about RESTful APIs to know how useful they can be to your website or app project. Even if you are not that technically minded, you should at least have some idea of what they do. They allow your app or software to communicate with other data sources to present that information to your users; whether that be simple statistics or images. This can allow you to offer a greater range of services to your users and improve their experience; which means that your website and app are likely to have a greater number of users.