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Hands-On RESTful API Design Patterns and Best Practices
Hands-On RESTful API Design Patterns and Best Practices

Hands-On RESTful API Design Patterns and Best Practices: Design, develop, and deploy highly adaptable, scalable, and secure RESTful web APIs

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Hands-On RESTful API Design Patterns and Best Practices

Design Strategy, Guidelines, and Best Practices

In the today's digitalized world, the challenges are about interconnecting various heterogeneous devices with abundant software services available across the internet and intranets. The application programmable interface (API) is one of the most promising software paradigms to address anything, anytime, anywhere, and any device, which is the one substantial need of the digital world at the moment. This chapter discusses how APIs and API designs help to address those challenges and bridge the gaps.

This chapter discusses a few essential API design guidelines, such as consistency, standardization, reusability, and accessibility through REST interfaces, which could equip API designers with better thought processes for their API modeling.

The following are this chapter's objectives:

  • Learning about REST API and its importance...

Technical requirements

This chapter is primarily intended to introduce readers to various RESTful design concepts involving design strategies and best practices; we expect that readers already have a basic understanding of software design concepts, client-server architecture, and basic data exchange formats, such as JSON and XML.

We assume readers have a basic understanding of web architecture, HTTP methods, headers, and related client-server concepts. However, we strongly encourage our readers to refresh their knowledge of design principles such as SOLID, OO designs, enterprise integration, SOA, and microservice architecture fundamentals.

Learning about REST API and its importance

In the first chapter, we learned about RESTful principles such as client-server, statelessness, cacheable, and layered, and we'll recognize and apply those principles to the low-level yet functional APIs in this chapter. Also, we will learn RESTful API design strategies and best practices that can help us to meet the challenge of any time, anywhere, and any device.

Let's think of an example—assume you're going to an event, where along with other activities there will be a screening of the film Solo (the latest in the Star Wars series), and you know that some of your friends joining the party aren't familiar with Star Wars and the earlier sequels. So being a tech geek, you wanted to help your friends with a simple mobile application that can send search results to your WhatsApp group as messages with details...

Goals of RESTful API design

From the API examples that we've seen so far, you might have observed that they're straightforward, unambiguous, easy to consume, well-structured, and most importantly accessible with well-known and standardized HTTP methods.

By now, we have a fair understanding of the APIs, and that they are one of the best possible solutions for resolving many digitization challenges out of the box; with our earlier examples, we also know who is consuming those APIs. Now let's ponder how we can create such usable APIs and expose them for consumption. Are there any basic and necessary principles for designing APIs that we must take into account even before we delve into API design? What should the API allow the consumers to do with it? What do the consumers want to do with it? To answer our questions, we will need to understand the following API design...

API designer roles and responsibilities

Before we discuss API design goals, principles and practices, let's touch upon the primary roles of a software architect, solution architect, software designer, or anyone who's ready to take responsibility for designing RESTful APIs.

To produce successful APIs, an API designer should have or do the following:

  • Be well-versed in REST fundamentals and API design best practices
  • Be acquainted with API design patterns to create a modern API design
  • Focus on the factors discussed in this chapter such as API design goals and best practices that can improve the application developer's experience
  • Translate the business domain into several APIs by having a clear understanding of the business vision and its functions
  • Closely work with API developers and help them with their day-to-day constraints and to deal with their existing legacy...

API design best practices

Let's think about who the consumers of any web service APIs are. Will it be another system, another software application, or an end-user? Mostly, the consumers of the APIs are another software application or another system itself. So, we can conclude that the customers of any API will be the app developers who give life to the software make it purposeful and usable by their programming codes. So the APIs are heavily dependent on the application developers or app developers.

So application developers should be the primary focus of API design, and for them to consume the APIs, there should be defined and accessible business functions. Please do remember that without any application developer or app developers ready to use the API, the API will cease to exist.

The following is a list of best practices used by API designers to produce APIs that app...

API design principles

To create flexible, scalable, and secure APIs, an API designer needs a set of guidelines. We'll discuss the following essential principles:

  • Ubiquitous web standards
  • API flexibility
  • API standardization
  • API optimization
  • API granularity
  • API sandbox or playground

By doing so, we will be able to understand how following them will help us to design high-quality RESTful APIs.

Ubiquitous web standards

As we discussed in the Goals of RESTful API design section, API designers should embrace the existing web standards and develop their API design and platforms, resulting in ubiquitous communication between the RESTful APIs and clients.

Let's ask ourselves a few questions that will help us to derive better...

RESTful API design rules

Now that we understand the roles and responsibilities of an API designer, the API design best practices, and the API design core principles, we can cover one more essential API design aspect called the rules of APIs. The best practices and design principles are guidelines that API designers try to incorporate in their API design. However, the rules of API need to be amended in the API design to make our APIs RESTful. So, this section is dedicated to RESTful API rules such as the following:

  • Use of Uniform Resource Identifiers
  • URI authority
  • Resource modelling
  • Resource archetypes
  • URI path
  • URI query
  • Metadata design rules (HTTP headers and returning error codes) and representations
  • Client concerns (versioning, security, and hypermedia processing)

We're confident that having a clear understanding of these rules will move us closer to design and begin...

Summary

As part of design strategies, we looked at what an API is and its importance for connecting devices with various other devices and technologies in the digitization era. We examined a few essential API design characteristics, such as affordance, leveraging, and maximizing existing web infrastructure, along with API design goals, such as consistency, simplification, flexible yet stable APIs, and how it is essential for an API designer to focus on the APP developers—the consumers of the APIs.

We also briefly discussed the role of an API designer and how they need to follow design principles and rules, so that they can create better RESTful APIs. We concluded this chapter by giving the necessary rules for RESTful APIs, along with some dos and don'ts.

So, we've set a strong foundation and the path for you to get your hands on API programming in our next two...

Further reading

We encourage readers to refer to https://www.packtpub.com/all for various reference materials and a vast collection of books on RESTful services and APIs.

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Key benefits

  • Understand advanced topics such as API gateways, API securities, and cloud
  • Implement patterns programmatically with easy-to-follow examples
  • Modernize legacy codebase using API connectors, layers, and microservices

Description

This book deals with the Representational State Transfer (REST) paradigm, which is an architectural style that allows networked devices to communicate with each other over the internet. With the help of this book, you’ll explore the concepts of service-oriented architecture (SOA), event-driven architecture (EDA), and resource-oriented architecture (ROA). This book covers why there is an insistence for high-quality APIs toward enterprise integration. It also covers how to optimize and explore endpoints for microservices with API gateways and touches upon integrated platforms and Hubs for RESTful APIs. You’ll also understand how application delivery and deployments can be simplified and streamlined in the REST world. The book will help you dig deeper into the distinct contributions of RESTful services for IoT analytics and applications. Besides detailing the API design and development aspects, this book will assist you in designing and developing production-ready, testable, sustainable, and enterprise-grade APIs. By the end of the book, you’ll be empowered with all that you need to create highly flexible APIs for next-generation RESTful services and applications.

Who is this book for?

This book is primarily for web, mobile, and cloud services developers, architects, and consultants who want to build well-designed APIs for creating and sustaining enterprise-class applications. You’ll also benefit from this book if you want to understand the finer details of RESTful APIs and their design techniques along with some tricks and tips.

What you will learn

  • Explore RESTful concepts, including URI, HATEOAS, and Code on Demand
  • Study core patterns like Statelessness, Pagination, and Discoverability
  • Optimize endpoints for linked microservices with API gateways
  • Delve into API authentication, authorization, and API security implementations
  • Work with Service Orchestration to craft composite and process-aware services
  • Expose RESTful protocol-based APIs for cloud computing
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Publication date : Jan 31, 2019
Length: 378 pages
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Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781788992664
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Table of Contents

12 Chapters
Introduction to the Basics of RESTful Architecture Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Design Strategy, Guidelines, and Best Practices Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Essential RESTful API Patterns Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Advanced RESTful API Patterns Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Microservice API Gateways Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
RESTful Services API Testing and Security Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
RESTful Service Composition for Smart Applications Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
RESTful API Design Tips Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
A More In-depth View of the RESTful Services Paradigm Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Frameworks, Standard Languages, and Toolkits Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Legacy Modernization to Microservices-Centric Apps Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Other Books You May Enjoy Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

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Richard Chassereau Jan 06, 2020
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Great information provided in this book. The table of contents makes it a little difficult to follow, but the book does offer a good deal of knowledge. This is a great for reference.
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Gustavo Caetano de Souza Feb 22, 2022
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This is a good book until the middle, after that there are a lot of "duplicated" texts.
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Chrisian Weber Jan 08, 2020
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If you consider bying;Amazon offers a preview to the first pages, if you like the style and the depth in which the topics are covered, then the book is for you. If you hope that later chapters provide more details, then it is not!I returned the book, because when starting reading it i had the impression, that it lacked the depth (mostly superficial information), structure (repetitions) and quality (diagrams, writing style) to be a helpful book.
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grmrcy Jan 21, 2020
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The book is repetitive, with one and the same passage reappearing many times over from chapter to chapter. Mostly talk, talk, talk. Looks like the intention was good, but the effort didn't last long enough. Does this publisher employ editors?
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Leandro Takeda Sep 26, 2019
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There is a big quantity of text and no practice. There are a few codes o Java Spring but this is not the purpose of the book. A lot of theory. I understand there is a lot of effort on this book but this is maybe to who know nothing about APIs, and want some theory.
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