Resources are the basic components of an API. Examples of resources from an online Phone Store API include a phone, an order from a store, and a collection of customers.

After you identify a service to expose as an API, you define the resources for the API. CentraSite's flexible metadata store captures the relationships of APIs with resources and ensures that the APIs are available in the right way.

For example, consider the case of an online Phone Store API. In this example, there are a number of ways to represent the data in the phone store database as an API. The verbs in the HTTP request maps to the operations that the database supports, such as select, create, update, delete.

Each resource needs to be addressable by a unique URI. Along with the URI you're going to expose for each resource, you also need to decide what can be done to each resource. The HTTP methods passed as part of an HTTP request header direct the API what needs to be done with the addressed resource.