RESTful API

Representational State Transfer Application Programming Interface, commonly known as a RESTful API, is widely regarded as the gold standard for communication between software applications.

RESTful API is based on the HTML standard, established in 1991, which introduced the GET command. A GET command makes up most internet traffic and occurs when your browser requests a web page or an asset from a server. It's essentially a "read'' command. However, the GET command wasn't the only one specified in the original standard. Other commands like POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE were also part of this original protocol. It’s hard to imagine someone setting up a server so an end user somewhere out there on the internet could send a DELETE request but it was in the original specification.

Fast forward a decade, and we began to see the emergence of Web 2.0, or API-driven websites. Although they didn't truly gain popularity until the 2010s, these first JavaScript-driven websites marked a significant shift in the web experience. These sites would render the page on the end user's browser and then call a web server's API to retrieve up-to-date data for a specific part of the page. This innovation meant that an entire page didn't need to be regenerated and transmitted every time the user needed updated data.

Nowadays, nearly all websites and web applications employ some type of API managed by JavaScript on the end browser. What began as an innovative approach to adding minor functionality to a website has evolved into a fundamental architectural design concept, considered from the very outset of a new project. In this context, the API has become more vital than the HTML itself.

A RESTful API leverages the HTTP standard, traditionally used for sending, editing, and retrieving web pages, to handle other types of data, primarily JSON objects. JSON objects, which are a more compact form of an XML document (used in early APIs), can store diverse data types such as strings, numbers, arrays, or even other objects.

RESTful API, use the HTTP commands: the GET command reads data, PUT and PATCH are used to create and edit data, POST is for transmitting data to a webserver for specific functions, and DELETE is used for data removal.

At Nexoid, our entire operation is based on RESTful APIs. For instance, signing in and obtaining a session token involves sending a POST request, while fetching a record uses a GET request, with create and updates handled with PUT and PATCH commands. The flexibility provided by the React.JS , the technology behind our frontend, in tandem with the Elasticsearch database, means that Nexoid remains agnostic to the data structure in records. This gives huge control and flexibility to developers, allowing them to develop virtually any business workflow.

Our RESTful API is so comprehensive that we use the same API we provide to our end users. Documentation, including examples and step-by-step guides, can be found at https://developer.nexoid.com/api.

You might be wondering about what this means for non-developers. Well, we've got you covered. Unlike some of our competitors who conceal security tokens in the request header, we use a straightforward "session_id" variable in all secure requests. While this doesn't compromise request security, it greatly simplifies scripting for IT operations personnel. Easy scripting languages like PowerShell, CURL and even VBScript are 100% compatible with the Nexoid API, giving power users the ability to do almost anything.