REST API Basics

Part of the Web course

You are asked to add an endpoint to an existing API and you freeze on the first decision: is it POST /users/42/deactivate or PATCH /users/42? Both work. Both will ship. But one of them will read as obvious to the next person and one will start an argument in code review.

Picture a filing cabinet. Every drawer and every folder has an address, and the address never says what you intend to do when you get there. The doing is a separate decision: read it, replace it, throw it away. REST splits an API the same way. The URL is the address of a thing. The HTTP method is the verb. ...