What is a Web Service API?

Web Services are a means to allow machines to communicate. A good Web Service provides clear routes that we can integrate into external services. These routes are called endpoints. It also provides responses in a machine-readable way, which we can also integrate into these services.

There are different types of Web Service APIs such as SOAP or REST. Joomla implements a REST API, so all the concepts in this chapter relate to this kind of API.

To use a Web Service API, we submit an HTTP request to these endpoints, and we get a response with the data or some message related to our request. The main HTTP requests we can use in a Web Service are as follows:

• GET: You use this request when you want to retrieve data from the API. A good example of this is when you want to retrieve a list of articles from the site.
• POST: You use a POST request when you want to submit new data. For instance, when you want to create a new article in Joomla! using a...