'REST' in Peace

'REST' in Peace

We have so-many patterns to fetch data from the server, One of the popular pattern is REST, But nowdays we have lots of other patterns, let's see is REST is still relevant to use in 2022?

What is REST?

REST is a software architectural pattern that defines a set of constraints to be used for creating services. They also known as RESTful services, provide interoperability between computer systems on the Internet.

Who invented REST?

REST was defined by Roy Fielding, a computer scientist. He presented the REST principles in his PhD dissertation in 2000.

REST-compliant Web services allow requesting systems to access and manipulate textual representations of Web resources by using a uniform and predefined set of stateless operations. Other kinds of Web services, such as SOAP Web services, expose their own arbitrary sets of operations.

If that's lot to consume for you; here is it in simple words,

• REST is a way of communicating between two systems.
• It is a set of rules that define how the communication should happen.

REST stands for REpresentational State Transfer.

Below is what makes an API RESTful and what constraints and rules you should follow if you want to create RESTful APIs,

let’s explain 2 key terms:

• Client — the client is the person or software who uses the API. It can be a developer, for example you, as a developer, can use openweather API to read data from Openweather,and do more actions in a program that you write. Your program will call Openweather’s API. The client can also be a web browser. When you go to Openweather website, your browser is the client who calls Openweather API and uses the returned data to render information on the screen.

• Resource — a resource can be any object the API can provide information about.

There are some limitations for the REST pattern, here is a great article which explains the limitations of REST.

According to me, REST is still relevant to use in 2022, but we have other patterns like GraphQL,tRPC which is more efficient than REST. How ?

Well REST has mainly 2 major limitations such as Data Overfetching or Data Underfetching,

• Data Overfetching: When you fetch data from the server, you get more data than you need. This is a waste of bandwidth and processing power.
• Data Underfetching: When you fetch data from the server, you get less data than you need. So you need to make a call to other endpoint, This is a waste of time and bandwidth.

GraphQL essestially solves the above limitation by declaring the data schema & the data you need in a single request.