10 Tweets 22 reads Nov 03, 2021
Best practices for designing REST APIs.
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The abbreviation REST stands for "REpresentational State Transfer".
REST APIs are used to call resources and allow the software to communicate based on standardized principles, properties, and constraints.
1๏ธโƒฃ Correct status codes
When developing REST APIs, make sure you use the HTTP status code. This helps your user to know if the request they have made is successful or not.
There are a lot of HTTP status codes. But here are the most common ones:
200Ok
400Bad Request
403Forbidden
404Not Found
500 Internal Server Error
Implement at least these five while building a REST API
2๏ธโƒฃ Using JSON
JSON is commonly used to exchange data between client and server. Although it is derived from JavaScript, it is supported by other major languages, either natively or through libraries.
So using JSON for accepting and responding to requests is the best practice.
3๏ธโƒฃ Nested Endpoints
Nested endpoints are the best practice if nested points are related to the endpoint.
Let's, you can get a list of all the cars using /cars endpoint. If you want to see the cars based on the car manufacturer, you should use an endpoint like /cars/manufacturer.
4๏ธโƒฃ Using SSL Certificate
You can achieve the security of your application by adding a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate. By doing this, you will use HTTPS protocol instead of HTTP and make your site less vulnerable to any malicious attacks.
5๏ธโƒฃ Versioning Your REST API
You should version your REST API if you are introducing any breaking changes. This way, your clients can still access the old version, and their products will not break as soon as you launch a new release.

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