RESTful APIs
RESTful APIs (Representational State Transfer APIs) are a set of architectural principles for designing networked applications, using HTTP methods to perform operations on resources identified by URLs. They enable communication between client and server systems in a stateless, cacheable, and scalable manner, typically exchanging data in formats like JSON or XML. This approach is widely used for web services, mobile apps, and microservices architectures.
Developers should learn RESTful APIs because they are the standard for building web services and enabling interoperability between different systems, such as in microservices, mobile backends, and public APIs. They are essential for creating scalable and maintainable applications that need to expose data or functionality over the internet, such as in e-commerce platforms, social media apps, or IoT devices.