Twilio's REST APIs

Twilio’s APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) power its platform for communications. Behind these APIs is a software layer connecting and optimizing communications networks around the world to allow your users to call and message anyone, globally.

What is a rest API anyway ?

An API is an application programming interface - in short, it’s a set of rules that lets programs talk to each other, exposing data and functionality across the internet in a consistent format.

REST stands for Representational State Transfer. This is an architectural pattern that describes how distributed systems can expose a consistent interface. When people use the term ‘REST API,’ they are generally referring to an API accessed via HTTP protocol at a predefined set of URLs.

These URLs represent various resources - any information or content accessed at that location, which can be returned as JSON, HTML, audio files, or images. Often, resources have one or more methods that can be performed on them over HTTP, like GET, POST, PUT and DELETE.

Twilio, for example, provides many separate REST APIs for sending text messages, making phone calls, looking up phone numbers, managing your accounts, and a whole lot more. In Twilio’s ecosystem, each product is its own API, but you will work with each of them in roughly the same way, whether over HTTP or using Twilio’s helper libraries for several different programming languages.