Advantages of a separate REST backend API?

Question

Context: I\'m a beginner programmer, self taught in the hope of making a SPA. I\'ve started with JavaScript, Jquery, PHP and MySQL, and now feel pretty confident with all. I

Answer 1

well for me you'll get a lot of advantages using a rest API, they are lightweight, extensible and overall reusable.

today it's a trend to use a vertical architecture that means having a RestFul service with a single responsibility, why because it scale better and it's easier to assign a team to an api, so that way you'll be able to manage several teams and apis in a very ordered way. This is probably how Twitter, wunderlist and other companies works, because it's a solution to scale better.

take a look to this talk by Raffi Krikorian he was the head of architecture of Twitter for a while is a little bit old but it worth every minute and to illustrate some of the advantages. Also you can look at the diagram below, I did while ago it explains the differences between the MVC and API first type of architecture.

I've authored one rest app using angular and rest services and it has been a very nice experience to me there's no way back.

good luck