使用Twilio的REST API

Question

Not being familiar with REST and after reading some doc about it I am a little bit confused about the way it works.

I actually want to use Twilio SMS Gateway that provides a REST API to interact with and send text messages from an existing web-application.

From what I understand, REST is a way to structure a web service and in the end, instead of using SOAP for example, we just access 'resources' with URLs, relying on HTTP to GET, PUT or DELETE data.

The SMS Gateway I am talking about is providing a Java API that I could integrate to my web-app. The classes in this API uses httpcore, httpclient and commons-codec jars. Is this because REST rely on HTTP?

So basically, their API is relying on the Apache and HTTP libs to construct HTTP requests in Java and setting the basics, so I just have to provide with the data I want to submit and/or specific information?

Answer 1

REST API's are HTTP API's. The word REST is supposed to indicate something about how your API works. Basically that you use POST requests to update data and GET requests to retrieve it, and you have different HTTP endpoints for all of the different resources in your API, like Calls or Recordings.

The Twilio helper libraries (including the Java library) are basically wrappers around HTTP calls to the Twilio API. The idea was to make it easier for you to make API calls to Twilio by abstracting away the HTTP authentication and request stuff behind some more language-specific code. We also parse the HTTP response into an object for you.