APIs provide smooth communication between web applications, including software systems and services. Many third-party applications provide APIs to enable businesses to utilize their functionality and data. For example, payment gateways like Stripe offer APIs that developers can use to integrate into their web applications for processing payments.
Web applications utilize REST APIs to exchange data using HTTP requests. These requests encompass a range of parameters, including but not limited to GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. By employing these methods, software and services can seamlessly access, transmit, and modify data stored in databases, facilitating resource sharing and interaction.
There are many cases where you may need web APIs, and there are several frameworks available for developers to create one; they include Spring Boot (JAVA), Express, Laravel (PHP), Django REST, ADONIS (JS), etc. These frameworks come with features that make it easy for developers to create web APIs. Here's an article on APIs that will help you understand them better.
Our focus in this article will be AdonisJS, but before that, we'll discuss RESTful APIs and why we need them, followed by a walkthrough of how to build one.
Let’s get started!
What is Restful API?
Restful API, deduced from REST (Representational State Transfer) - an architectural style or communication standard between computers over the Internet, is an application program that follows REST architecture.
Let's assume we have an application that is designed to showcase a comprehensive list of all the students enrolled in a school. When you search for students on this app, it retrieves the information from a specific source. Additionally, when you input the details of new students who have recently registered at your school, this information is also sent to the same source.
How do we send and retrieve data from this storage location? This process is possible with the use of an API. A Restful API is the middleman between the application and the server, where all the information is stored. It delivers data from the application to the server and from the server to the application.






























