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Understanding of RESTful APIs and the Best Practices

A RESTful API is an architectural style for an Application program interface (API).

So, What is API ??🤔

API is defined as an Interface that helps two different software’s to communicate and exchange data with each other. It offers various services between two products without knowing the implementation of that service.

Let’s Understand with the help of Day to Day life Example

API works like a waiter serving a Customer in a restaurant. Whenever we go to the restaurant we are handed a menu of items from which we can request some of the items as per our instructions, How are we gonna need those items and tell the waiter to bring them up.

Now, the Waiter working as our API will go and give our requested items to the kitchen team who will prepare the items with our specified instructions and hand them over to the waiter again.

Now the waiter will bring all the items and serves them on the table and we can review whether all the items that are requested by us with specified instructions have been received or not.

The waiter in this scenario plays a similar role to an API in web-based data delivery.

We can think of it as an API a Gateway between a client and a web resource.

Okay, then what’s the need for REST Prefix in API?😴

REST Stands for Representational State Transfer states instructions and imposes some regulations that how API Should work. REST is nothing but an Architectural Pattern used in order to develop an API. APIs Which are built on top of REST architecture is known as RESTful APIs.

REST Architectural Pattern Consist of some of the Principles:

The uniform interface constraint is fundamental to the design of any REST service. It States that the Interface through which we are interacting with the server should be Uniform irrespective of any device or type of application (website, mobile app).

All the resources are identified from the request if we wanna access the user name Julio Kamile then we can navigate to a URL Pattern like

A Message That is returned to the client when a client requests something should be pretty straightforward so that client can take action by understanding that message.

After the response is rendered to the client’s Machine then the client can navigate to other actions using hyperlinks so the client should be able to use hyperlinks.

The client has all the representation of the resources and this contains enough information to update or delete the resource onto the server if the client has been given permission.

As all the information required to handle the request is directly included in the request itself server would not store anything related to the request and session.

In REST Pattern client need to embed all the information regarding the request in the request header itself using Query Parameters, Headers, and URI for the Server to respond accordingly.

Cacheable helps to streamline the data between the Client and Server.

Caching refers to storing the server’s response in the client’s browser and when again the client requests the same object the request will not hit the server but it will be satisfied by the browser cache memory.

Server’s Response has detailed information on how the caching should be done and for what period of time this information should be cached in local memory.

Well Organized and Managed coaching will eliminate the Client-Server Interaction and increase the response speed and performance.

REST Architecture depends on the Client-Server Architecture.

A client-server architecture is made up of clients, servers, and resources, with requests-responses managed through HTTP.

When the Client requests the representation to the server and the server responds to the request in between that there exist various composed layers.

This layer might provide security, Caching, Load-Balancing, and various other functionalities.

These layers won’t affect the request-response.

So, this all the principles that are followed by the REST APIs 🐱‍🏍

Now, here are the few Practices that you should keep in while building or accessing the REST API for your next Project:

👉 Always Use the JSON Format for Sending and Receiving Data.

Because JSON is a LightWeight Format that is easy to read and write. Also, it is Language Independent i.e we can work with this using any programming language. JSON Documents can be easily parsed to any Data Structure that can be used in programs.

👉 Make the Use of Nouns Instead of Verbs in the End Points

As we know a verb is an HTTP Method i.e GET, PUT, POST, DELETE, etc whereas Noun is the resource that is identified by the resource.

let’s take an Example and Understand:

Endpoints should not look like this:

Instead of that, it should be something like this:

👉 Use Status Code in Error Handling

Always use the HTTP Status Code in response to the request made to the API, this will help the Client to identify what’s going on and whether the request is successfully executed or it fails.

Here is a table that shows different HTTP Status Code ranges and their meanings:

👉 Make Use of Nested resources to show relationships

When Designing an endpoint keep the thing in mind that if one object can contain another object, we should design the endpoint to reflect that.

For Example:

We can get the ratingId inside rating which underlies inside books and can be filtered by bookId.

Huge Nesting should be avoided because that leads to making the API less elegant and readable.

👉 Make Use of Filtering, Sorting, and Pagination to Retrieve the Data Requested.

Paging, Sorting, and Filtering help to retrieve the small and minimal as well as effective data that can be displayed using datasets. This will help to load the necessary data to the page.

👉 Well-Formed Documentation

As the API is used by the Developers so huge organizations need to Document in which manner should developer work with the API by specifying the detailed information about the API.

Documentation should contains information regarding the endpoints, various examples, and implementation using several programming languages

There are several tools in the market using which documentation can be created easily such as:

So, that’s it about the REST API in this article we have seen what is API and what makes API a REST API, and some of the Best Practices while building REST APIs.

Hope it was useful for you.

let me know your thoughts in the comment box 💭

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