What are RESTful APIs?

RESTful APIs (Representational State Transfer) are a set of web service principles that use HTTP methods to interact with resources represented by URLs. They follow a stateless, client-server architecture, where each request from the client to the server must contain all the information needed to understand and process the request. RESTful APIs typically use standard HTTP methods like GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE for CRUD operations and often return data in formats like JSON or XML.