Best Practices for Planning, Designing, and Managing APIs MuleSoft Blog
Table Of Content
I'd like to go with apicache, but if you want to use Redis, I can highly recommend that you check out their great docs. One important thing you have to keep in mind when serving data from a cache is that this data can become outdated. So you have to make sure that the data inside the cache is always up to date. So it's more effective to do it in our API and to send the sorted data to the client.
What is REST (REpresentational State Transfer)? Definition from TechTarget - TechTarget
What is REST (REpresentational State Transfer)? Definition from TechTarget.
Posted: Mon, 24 Jan 2022 22:05:06 GMT [source]
Maintain good security practices
Designing a REST API is not completely disjoint from its implementation. Even if everything you need on the server side is well-defined, you will need to have it running to do the client-side API. It doesn’t make any difference whether you have a real development server, or Node.js on a local machine.
Code-first vs. design-first API development
Most backend frameworks have built-in functions to automatically parse the data to JSON format. 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. “K”eep “I”t “S”imply “S”tupid when you are designing your API. While APIs are meant for computer-to-computer interaction, the first client of an API is always a human, and the API contract is the first piece of documentation. Developers are more apt to study your payload design before they dig into your docs.
Be Clear with Versioning
This setup ensures that sensitive data is not exposed in your codebase and is kept secure during deployment. In this example, logRequests is a middleware function that logs every request’s method and URL before passing control to the actual route handler through the next function. Discover how to generate, apply, and manage API keys in AWS API Gateway, ensuring effective authentication and robust access control for your services. Organizations looking for the best tools to support their REST API management can leverage Moesif’s powerful API analytics and monetization capabilities. To try it yourself, sign up today and start with a 14-day free trial; no credit card is required. Sorting can be implemented in REST APIs by using a query parameter, typically ‘sort’, which takes a field name to specify the sort criteria.
Developers need to create and integrate the logic that processes these query parameters. This involves extracting them from the request URL and using them to refine data queries or apply conditional logic. Much like a well-tailored suit, REST API endpoints should exhibit a sense of style and precision.
The actual storage model is often more complex than the conceptual model, but it doesn't always have to be. Decoupling them is useful because it allows you to keep the conceptual model simple even if performance or other concerns force compromises in the storage model. Personally, I don't like the idea of encoding queries in the path portion of a URL rather than in the query string, because it encourages people to confuse query with identity lookups. But many people do what you are doing, so I won't claim it is wrong. Once a few teams have done the same thing, it's not clear anymore which is the real API, if any. Some people make a virtue out of this (hence the concept of experience APIs), but I like to minimize layering.
Get started with API design
Create, read, update and delete (CRUD) elements combine to enable developers to create new features and testing. It's common, however, that an API does not require the full CRUD structure. For example, a mobile app may depend specifically on the read function. Or, a developer may add create but think, "I'll add delete later." Sometimes, later never comes. Paths of endpoints should be consistent, we use nouns only since the HTTP methods indicate the action we want to take.
Basic Setup
Programmers must develop a standard way to work on the client and server, share code and collaborate. The days of rolling your own networking using the sockets library in C are long gone. JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), is the de facto standard for REST APIs. An organization that widely uses Microsoft technologies might opt to use Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), which supports the Web Services Description Language (WSDL). If you point your client application to a WSDL file, you can write code against the API almost as if it were a code library.
Using Gemini Code Assist to build APIs, integrations, and automation flows
Choosing between plural and singular nouns in resource names is not arbitrary, but rooted in logic. Plural nouns naturally represent collections or repositories of resources, making them the ideal choice for naming URIs. Singleton resources, which correspond to a single instance or specific record, are represented by singular nouns. Using nouns in URI names prevents redundancy, as it avoids repeating the CRUD functionality that is already specified by the HTTP request methods. A good example of noun usage in URI names would be ‘/orders’ to represent a resource encompassing all orders. An incorrect example would be using ‘/getOrders’, which unnecessarily include the CRUD operation ‘get’.
Not all characters are universally accessible, contributing to user perplexity. Following these tips will help reduce confusion, create aesthetically appealing URIs, and allow you to filter URI collection effectively. This approach has the advantages of allowing the team to quickly implement APIs and also providing the flexibility to react very quickly to any unexpected API requirement changes.
Likewise, an incorrect call should produce an appropriate 400 or 500 response code with relevant information to help user better operate against the collection. It's essential to manage sensitive configuration details, such as API keys and database credentials, securely. Next.js supports environment variables, which can be defined in a .env.local file for development and securely provided in production environments.
This is the most important thing in the setup that will make the whole magic happen. Let's start with the simplest one and return all workouts that are stored and start with implementing the corresponding method inside our Data Access Layer (src/database/Workout.js). In our application we'd like to create, read, update and delete WOD's (Workouts of the Day).
Unfortunately, by the time you’ve built an API in code, you’ve lost out on a lot of the advantages of a design-first approach. When your API design exists before the implementation, you can get early feedback, connect your API to tools from the start, and collaborate across departments and functions. Since we can't get people to agree which one they want, we just implement both in the APIs I work on. In my experience, the energy required to implement both is much less than the energy required to argue about it.
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