API Design Patterns: Best Practices for Building Robust APIs
The gateway acts as a first line of defense, enforcing security policies, access controls, and threat mitigation strategies to safeguard the microservices ecosystem. Gateway offloading is a practice in microservices architecture where certain tasks or responsibilities are shifted away from the individual microservices and delegated to a centralized gateway or proxy. This offloading helps optimize the performance and scalability of the microservices ecosystem by reducing the burden on individual services. Imagine you’re building an e-commerce platform where you need to integrate various services and functionalities from different providers to offer a comprehensive shopping experience. These functionalities may include product listings, payment processing, order tracking, and user authentication.
Cache-Control
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.
REST beyond the Obvious – API Design for ever-evolving Systems - devmio
REST beyond the Obvious – API Design for ever-evolving Systems.
Posted: Thu, 30 Jun 2022 14:24:24 GMT [source]
GraphQL APIs
We hope you find theintermediate results of our ongoing efforts useful. We will be glad tohear about your feedback and constructive criticism. We also welcomecontributions such as pointers to known uses or war stories in which youhave seen some of the patterns (or variants of them) in action. Microservices architectures have evolved from previous incarnationsof Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs). They consistof independently deployable, scalable and changeable services, eachhaving a single responsibility. Microservices often aredeployed in lightweight virtualization containers, encapsulate their ownstate, and communicate via message-based remote APIs in a loosely coupled fashion.
Message Queue API
We've already implemented the endpoints correctly without using verbs inside the URL, but let's take a look how our URL's would look like if we had used verbs. It doesn't make much sense to use verbs inside your endpoints and is, in fact, pretty useless. Generally each URL should point towards a resource (remember the box example from above). Leaving this error message more generic for all properties will be okay for now.
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.
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.
setTimeout(function()
Sometimes, there's so much data that it shouldn’t be returned all at once because it’s way too slow or will bring down our systems. Whenever our API does not successfully complete, we should fail gracefully by sending an error with information to help users make corrective action. Having verbs in our API endpoint paths isn’t useful and it makes it unnecessarily long since it doesn’t convey any new information.
Good security practices
The endpoint for creating or updating a workout needs data from the client. In other words, let's start implementing endpoints for creating, reading, updating and deleting workouts. You've just structured the project for handling different versions.
Request Validation
The secret sauce that elevates your RESTful API from good to great is performance optimization. From investing in reliable and fast network infrastructure to tracking various aspects of an API, every detail contributes to the performance of your API. When there are multiple rows of data available then APIs should give the requested data in batch-wise (Pagination). Design for intent is a method that expresses the different relationships between objects so that changes to one object automatically propagates changes to others.
OAuth 2.0 is an open standard for token-based authentication and authorization that is widely used in modern APIs. Another approach is to use JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) which provide a compact and secure way to transmit data between the client and the server. APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are the linchpins of the software world, enabling different systems to communicate and work together. Delving into the realm of API design patterns uncovers a plethora of strategies crucial for crafting efficient, robust, and scalable APIs. Let's explore the various API design patterns, each accompanied by its own set of secrets that can transform the way you approach API development.
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.
As you’re designing RESTful APIs, you’ll want to rely on the HTTP methods and best practices to express the primary purpose of a call. For that reason, you don’t want to use a POST to simply retrieve data. You should examine your use cases to determine when to use each.
But as you might know, in the real world a lot of errors can happen – either from a human or a technical perspective. Our API has the ability now to handle basic CRUD operations with data storage. First, we create a simple Util Function to overwrite our JSON file to persist the data. Jump right back into our workout service and implement the logic for getAllWorkouts. One workout consists of an id, name, mode, equipment, exercises, createdAt, updatedAt, and trainerTips. Let's take a look at our current implementation and see how we can integrate this best practice.
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.
Comments
Post a Comment