Saturday, April 27, 2024

Best practices for REST API design

api design patterns

For any bi-directional or client-streaming APIs, the server should rely onthe client-initiated half-close, as provided by the RPC system, to completethe client-side stream. APIs may want to distinguish between fields that are provided by the client asinputs and fields that are only returned by the server on output on a particularresource. For fields that are output only, the field attribute shall beannotated.

REST API Best Practices

This will be the function we'll use in our root file, where we created the Express server to make sure that the docs are booted up as well. To control if everything is up and running, we log a simple message to the console where we can find our docs. So, it's our job to implement a good and precise documentation.

console.error("Unknown deployment environment, defaulting to production");

However, building APIs that are reliable, scalable, and easy to use can be a complex task. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be a hustle, thanks to API design patterns. By following these and other REST API design patterns, developers can create APIs that are easy to understand, maintain, and use, and that can scale to meet the needs of large and complex systems. API Design Patterns reveal best practices for building stable, user-friendly APIs. These design patterns can be applied to solve common API problems and flexibly altered to fit your specific needs.

Providing the URI of the Newly Created Resource

You can look up all the specifications to describe an endpoint in their great docs. There's one important thing I'd like to note here when it comes to caching. While it seems to solve a lot of problems for you, it also can bring some problems into your application. We were able to serve three times faster than in our previous request! It took the "regular" way from the database and filled our cache.

Message Queue API

For network APIs, idempotent API methods are highly preferred, because they canbe safely retried after network failures. However, some API methods cannoteasily be idempotent, such as creating a resource, and there is a need to avoidunnecessary duplication. For such use cases, the request message shouldcontain a unique ID, like a UUID, which the server will use to detectduplication and make sure the request is only processed once. The performance of your RESTful API can be significantly enhanced through the efficient handling of request body and response messages. Acting as a gatekeeper, rate limiting protects your API resources.

Do we really need to move Monolithic to Microservices

If a client exceeds the limit, the API returns an error, preventing abuse of the system. API caching can be done on client-side, server-side, and distributed. On client-side caching, the client stores the response from the API in its own cache.

It is a useful design pattern when differentorganizations define their entity names in a decentralized manner. For example, an API with User resources could expose per-user settings as aSettings singleton. In API designs, unsigned integer types such as uint32 and fixed32should not be used because some important programming languages and systemsdon't support them well, such as Java, JavaScript and OpenAPI. Another issue is that different APIsare very likely to use mismatched signed and unsigned types for the same thing. An implementation of pagination may also provide the total count ofitems in an int32 field named total_size.

ASP.NET Web API: In-depth Architectural Patterns and Folder Structures - Medium

ASP.NET Web API: In-depth Architectural Patterns and Folder Structures.

Posted: Wed, 20 Sep 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Software Application Architecture

API design patterns provide best practices, specifications, and standards for building reliable and user-friendly APIs. These patterns can solve common API problems and be customized to fit specific needs. The last step in the API design process is to write documentation. Documentation might also include examples of API requests and responses, which give consumers crucial insight into how a particular API supports common business needs. Some tools can automatically generate documentation from an API definition, so teams don't have to worry about their documentation becoming outdated. Caching is an important design pattern in API development that improves the speed and efficiency of an API.

api design patterns

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. At the end of this tip you'll find again the complete implementation for the other endpoints. Let's think about an endpoint where we need to receive JSON data from the client.

For example our POST request to /api/v1/workouts for creating a new workout. User roles would also make sense in our use case when we only want specific users (like coaches) to create, update, and delete our workouts and records. In Express, for example, you can implement it as a middleware like we did with our cache for specific routes and check first if the request is authenticated before it accesses a resource. Filtering, as the name already says, is useful because it allows us to get specific data out of our whole collection. As you can see, an error consists of two things, a status and a message. I'm using just the throw keyword here to send out a different data structure than a string, which is required in throw new Error().

Microservices solutionsoften leverage polyglot programming and polyglot persistence, and DevOpspractices including decentralized continuous delivery and end-to-endmonitoring (Zimmermann (2017)). Creating robust APIs requires a firm grasp of essential patterns for REST API endpoints. The use of nouns in API endpoint signifies the existing resource being addressed, and collections should be named with plural nouns to indicate the possibility of multiple resources.

It’s now time to put these principles into action and create high-quality APIs that stand the test of time. APIs should have consistent error responses that provide useful information to developers. This includes clear error messages that explain what went wrong, as well as error codes that help developers identify the issue quickly. Also, use consistent data formats and response structures throughout the API to make it easier for developers to work with the API. Additionally, there are other design patterns such as filters, pagination, search, and sorting that can be applied to resources. The API can also support actions that do not map to CRUD operations, and these can be implemented using custom endpoints.

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