About RESTful APIs

REST is a style of software architecture that provides a convenient and consistent approach to requesting and modifying data.

The term REST is short for " Representational State Transfer ." In the context of Google APIs, it refers to using HTTP verbs to retrieve and modify representations of data stored by Google.

In a RESTful system, resources are stored in a data store; a client sends a request that the server perform a particular action (such as creating, retrieving, updating, or deleting a resource), and the server performs the action and sends a response, often in the form of a representation of the specified resource.

In Google's RESTful APIs, the client specifies an action using an HTTP verb such as POST , GET , PUT , or  DELETE . It specifies a resource by a globally-unique URI of the following form:

https://www.googleapis.com/ apiName 
/ apiVersion 
/ resourcePath 
? parameters 

Because all API resources have unique HTTP-accessible URIs, REST enables data caching and is optimized to work with the web's distributed infrastructure.

You may find the method definitions in the HTTP 1.1 standards documentation useful; they include specifications for GET , POST , PUT , and DELETE .