Tuesday, April 30, 2024

What is API Design? Principles & Best Practices

restful api design

The resulting APIs are reusable, secure, efficient, intuitive, and aligned with the organization's goals. Also, we can use caching so that we don't have to query for data all the time. We just add the version number to the start of the endpoint URL path to version them. We should have different versions of API if we're making any changes to them that may break clients. The versioning can be done according to semantic version (for example, 2.0.6 to indicate major version 2 and the sixth patch) like most apps do nowadays.

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This approach is quite useful if a project is about developing externally exposed set of APIs which will be consumed by partners. It is quite evident that if you want to communicate better, APIs are the way to go. But if they are designed badly, then it might increase confusion. So put your best effort into designing well, and the rest is just the implementation. Use of pagination is a must when you expose an API that might return huge data, and if proper load balancing is not done, the consumer might end up bringing down the service.

What are the benefits of RESTful APIs?

We can define a new cache by calling apicache.middleware and use it as a middleware inside our get route. You just have to put it as a parameter between the actual path and our workout controller. Let's think a second about a scenario in our API where a cache would make sense.

How to Architect APIs for Scale and Security Amazon Web Services - AWS Blog

How to Architect APIs for Scale and Security Amazon Web Services.

Posted: Tue, 30 Jul 2019 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Best practices for optimizing your REST API

restful api design

One of the commonest versioning systems in web development is semantic versioning. This is because HTTP methods such as GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE are already in verb form for performing basic CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations. For example, Python provides json.loads() and json.dumps() for working with JSON data.

Restful API Design - User Stories to Design Spec

The ability to layer application functions increases flexibility even further. For example, developers can make changes to the database layer without rewriting the application logic. RESTful web services support caching, which is the process of storing some responses on the client or on an intermediary to improve server response time. For example, suppose that you visit a website that has common header and footer images on every page.

restful api design

This sub-collection of configurations will be a subset of the primary collection of configurations and will be specific to a device only. Similar to device collection representation, create configuration collection representation with only minimal information. Note that both objects/resources in our above model will have a unique identifier, which is the integer id property. You have User Story, Resource details, URI  and it naturally flow to a swagger document. OAS YAML itself is not that hard to understand, it is recommended that you go through the basic structure and understand the same.

12 API security best practices to protect your business - TechTarget

12 API security best practices to protect your business.

Posted: Tue, 18 Oct 2022 07:00:00 GMT [source]

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After setting it all up we can now dive into the real implementation of our API. Like I said, I'd like to start with our fundamental CRUD endpoints. The other folders like controllers or services still remain inside our src directory.

Develop User Stories

An API catalog is the central element of any API design strategy. Catalogs hold API definitions and make them available to developers. In some cases, catalogs may also drive API management processes, like access control or load balancing. Most API management suites will include a catalog, and separate API catalog tools are available from companies like Swagger, Oracle and IBM, as well as in open source form, like ReDoc. Catalog tools may provide a computer-browsable catalog, a printed API document set or both. Decide what to look for before choosing a specific tool to manage the catalog.

Use Status Codes in Error Handling

As any experienced developer knows, databases can grow to huge sizes that become difficult to manage when they grow to huge sizes. When a request comes, we must retrieve only the data we need instead of returning everything in our database. JSON is a lightweight data exchange format that has become the standard for many developers. It is available in many technologies and makes encoding and decoding fast and easy on the server side due to its lightweight nature.

Inside the Controller we'll be handling all stuff that is related to HTTP. That means we're dealing with requests and responses for our endpoints. Above that layer is also a little Router from Express that passes requests to the corresponding controller. The response also contains headers or metadata about the response. They give more context about the response and include information such as the server, encoding, date, and content type.

If this is true, we'll go to the next middleware, that would be the one for checking the user's role. If the user has the appropriate role for accessing this resource the request is be passed to the corresponding controller. If you've got resources that should only be available to authenticated users, you should protect them with an authentication check. The first and absolute must have is to use SSL/TLS because it's a standard nowadays for communications on the internet. It's even more important for API's where private data is send between the client and our API.

It includes the URL to call, what to compare, the data to expect and a comment. You can find the full system in GitHub; the core Ruby function appears below. Tests act as an alternative documentation; they express what the software should do by example. Various API testing tools take these examples and capture them. For smaller projects, wrap a command-line tool such as curl.

We've got a resource called "workouts" on the one side and another called "records" on the other side. Every error that gets thrown inside our Workout.createNewWorkout() method will be caught inside our catch block. We're just throwing it back, so we can adjust our responses later inside our controller. Let's go one layer deeper into our workout service and see what potential errors might occur. In our Crossfit API we will take a look at the creation endpoint and see what errors might arise and how we can handle them.

REST, however, requires no specific interface definition, and offers wider support for data output types. If your API will interact with any non-Microsoft technology, SOAP may cause some interoperability issues. Without clear documentation, it will be impossible for the clients to use the API correctly.

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