# 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-4.3) in the HTTP 1.1 standards documentation useful; they include specifications for `GET`, `POST`, `PUT`, and `DELETE`.