The idea behind REST is that everything is a resource with an address. A customer, an order, an invoice: each has its own URL, and the type of request you send decides what happens to it. One kind of request retrieves it, another creates a new one, another updates it, another removes it. Once you have learned the pattern for one resource in an API, you have effectively learned all of them.
That predictability is why REST won. Developers can guess how a new API works before reading the documentation, and every programming language already speaks HTTP fluently, so nothing exotic is needed to connect two systems. Newer styles exist and have real advantages for complex data, but REST remains the safe default.
You do not need to touch a REST API to use Clerkzo, and most customers never do. It matters if you want conversations and captured leads flowing automatically into your own systems rather than being managed in the leads inbox, which is the point at which a developer on your team will care about the details.
Related terms
Browse all 142 terms- APIAn API, or application programming interface, is an agreed set of rules that lets one piece of software ask another for data or ask it to do something. It is how separate tools work together without either one knowing how the other is built.
- Encryption at RestEncryption at rest means data is stored in an encrypted form, so that anyone who obtains the underlying storage — a disk, a backup, a database file — cannot read it without the decryption key.
- JSONJSON is a lightweight, plain-text format for organising data as labelled fields, lists and nested groups. It is the format most web services use to send information to each other because it is readable by people and trivially parsed by software.
- iframeAn iframe is an HTML element that embeds one web page inside another, in its own isolated box. Embedded videos, maps and payment forms usually arrive as iframes, and the content inside one is walled off from the page around it.