REST API – Definition

Representational State Transfer API - A web service architecture that uses HTTP methods to enable communication between systems.

REST APIs are the most common approach for web service integration, providing standardized methods for creating, reading, updating, and deleting resources. They use JSON or XML for data exchange. REST's popularity comes from its simplicity relative to alternatives: it builds directly on standard HTTP methods and status codes, which means most developers already understand the basic interaction pattern. For content-heavy integrations, REST APIs typically expose resources hierarchically — a blog post resource might live at a URL that also references its author, category, and related content, making it straightforward to fetch a complete content object in a single request. Rate limiting is a practical consideration often underestimated during integration planning: most REST APIs cap the number of requests allowed within a given time window, and a content system that syncs large volumes of data needs to respect those limits with appropriate batching and retry logic, rather than triggering rate-limit errors that silently drop content updates.