RESTful API,is an .htaccess file with rewrite rules really necessary - apache

Question

Many tutorials that describe how to set up a RESTfull api mention the use of an htaccess file to rewrite the url.
To be honest I do not quite understand where this is useful, at least in my case.
Let me explain.I am building an appointment web app.The user stores appointments in the db-and of course the intention here is that this is done via REST.
The calendar is shown in a page named calendar.php.From the moment the user goes there a GET operation is initiated by backbone to a page named events.php:
var Events = Backbone.Collection.extend({
model: Event,
url: 'events.php'
});
Events.php is suppose to have code related db queries-I say suppose, because I have not written any code there yet.To write the app I am studying this tutorial here.
So here are my 2 questions:
Do you see any need here for htaccess and rewrite rules
The second question is why the url property in the tutorial(the code is found in the section titled Bringing in Backbone ) has as page just events(without the extension)-in that case htaccess would make sense,but why bother at all in the first place

Answer 1

There's absolutely no reason that a "REST" interface to an application should require mod_rewrite or htaccess.
It's generally only useful if you want to retroactively rewrite e.g. old to new URL's (because someone messed up!).
People use mod_rewrite for all sorts of nonsense, sometimes where core pieces of the stack already do it -- for example mapping /foo to /foo.php (mod_negotiation) or by insisting that their implementation read a query string but their URL's look like PATH_INFO.

Answer 2

Backbone models/collections uses AJAX and RESTful resources to get and set data from and to the server. For example collection.fetch() will send GET events.php to get all items. And model.save() will send POST events.php or PUT events.php/1 (where 1 is an ID of the model). Also when you need to get only one particular model data from the server it will send GET events.php/1 (where 1 is an ID of the model). So you may to do not use .htaccess file at all for your simple requests. You can just get and ID from $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] variable in PHP.