Table Of Content
We've defined some basic metadata of our API, created the docs in JSON format, and created a function that makes our docs available. Because we've planned to have different versions of our API, the docs will be a bit different, too. That's the reason why I'd like to define our swagger file to spin up our documentation inside the corresponding version folder. If you've got resources that should only be available to authenticated users, you should protect them with an authentication check. When I start building an API and there are no particular reasons to use a cache straight away, I leave it out and see what happens over time. Let's think a second about a scenario in our API where a cache would make sense.
SOAP APIs
Let's go one layer deeper into our workout service and see what potential errors might occur. This would be a good example to send back a 400 HTTP error with a corresponding error message. Let's move on to the next best practice and see how we can handle errors properly. You can implement the other methods by yourself or just copy my implementations. As you've might noticed, there are some properties missing like "id", "createdAt" and "updatedAt". That's the job of our API to add those properties before inserting it.
Get started with API design
In our application we'd like to create, read, update and delete WOD's (Workouts of the Day). This will help our users (that will be gym owners) come up with workout plans and maintain their own workouts inside a single application. On top of that, they also can add some important training tips for each workout. API-first is a development model in which applications are conceptualized and built with services that are delivered through APIs. Whereas companies that take a code-first approach might view APIs as afterthoughts, API-first companies design their APIs before they develop their applications. This strategy enables consumers and producers to collaborate on API definitions before the implementations are built out, which improves both the quality and usability of APIs.
Pagination
As you can see, logical nesting makes sense when you have resources that can be tied together. Theoretically you can nest it how deep you want, but the rule of thumb here is to go three levels deep at a maximum. For example, there is a workout where you have to do a certain order of exercises as quickly as possible. We record the times for all members to have a list of the time for each member who completed this workout. Things like "GET /api/v1/getAllWorkouts" or "DELETE api/v1/deleteWorkout/workoutId" are unnecessary.
return ReadingLists.DeploymentType.docker;
This technique helps us to make sure that we don't send more than twenty workouts at the same time with our response to the client. To move on in our architecture it would be advisable to create another controller, another service, and another collection of database methods that are responsible for records. That's the reason why it's always a good practice to return proper HTTP error codes for different cases. This helps the consumer or the engineer who built the API to identify the problem more easily. When interacting with an API, you always send specific data with your request or you receive data with the response. There are many different data formats but JSON (Javascript Object Notation) is a standardized format.
Handle errors gracefully and return standard error codes
When designing REST APIs, as expected, security is of paramount concern. From authentication mechanisms to error management techniques, every aspect plays a pivotal role in ensuring the safety and reliability of your API. Caching acts like a magic wand, reducing server load and enhancing API performance. HTTP caching mechanisms can be leveraged by REST APIs to reduce server load and improve response times. The artistic weaving of these methods with HTTP status codes enhances clarity and accuracy in API design. Unicode is an encoding standard that supports an international character set.
if(status != "ACTIVE" && status != "PAUSED") return;
For any REST API call, there is an implicit system query parameter $fields,which is the JSON representation of a google.protobuf.FieldMask value. Theresponse message will be filtered by the $fields before being sent back tothe client. This logic is handled automatically for all API methods by the APIPlatform.
Parameters to APIs
There are some great tools out there that make our lives easier. I know that documentation is definitely not a favorite task of developers, but it's a necessary thing to do. I like to start as simple and as clean as possible with everything I build.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
These are list of articles or api-guide covers general best practices. Then in each section below, we’ll cover each topic in more depth. The ReadWrite Editorial policy involves closely monitoring the tech industry for major developments, new product launches, AI breakthroughs, video game releases and other newsworthy events. Editors assign relevant stories to staff writers or freelance contributors with expertise in each particular topic area. Before publication, articles go through a rigorous round of editing for accuracy, clarity, and to ensure adherence to ReadWrite's style guidelines. This approach is quite useful if a project is about developing externally exposed set of APIs which will be consumed by partners.
They can all use the same kind of nesting structure for the path names. When you have collections of data, often you need provide the client a way to page through ororder the elements. Different approaches havedifference impacts on performance and database design. Remember to document your API thoroughly, provide clear examples, and ensure consistent and meaningful error handling. When you look at the top of our comment under "tags", you can see that I've added another key called "parameters", where I've defined our query parameter for filtering. There may be also resources or interactions with our API we don't want to allow every user to request.
Before we start implementing the best practices into our example project, I'd like to give you a brief introduction to what we'll be building. They should give you a direction to make your API's better in terms of user experience (for the consumer and the builder), security, and performance. There are helpful articles online which present many best practices, but many of them lack some practicality in my opinion. Knowing the theory with few examples is good, but I've always wondered how the implementation would look in a more real world example. These decisions should be captured in an API definition, which is a human- and machine-readable representation of an API's intended functionality. A domain-scoped name is an entity name that is prefixed by a DNS domain name toprevent name collisions.
RESTful Remote Object Proxies with ProxyManager — SitePoint - SitePoint
RESTful Remote Object Proxies with ProxyManager — SitePoint.
Posted: Mon, 12 Sep 2016 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Now that we have a really basic Express setup, we can extend our API with the following best practices. In order to follow along you need to have some experience in JavaScript, Node.js, Express.js and in Backend Architecture. Terms like REST and API shouldn't be new to you and you should have an understanding of the Client-Server-Model. I've merged all those learnings (good and bad) together into one digestible article while providing a practical example that can be followed along. In the end, we'll build a full API while we're implementing one best practice after another. API design is a highly iterative process that varies in duration according to the API's use case and requirements.
No comments:
Post a Comment