10 Best Practices for REST API Development in 2022
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These descriptions should use a standard template format that describes the API, the consumers, the maintainers, its location in the code and the tests that serve as examples. For instance, the OpenAPI open source language and tool is commonly used to define and document interfaces for APIs. APIs often provide development teams the support needed to deal with many microservices-specific problems. If you’re having second thoughts about a specific resource or collection’s functionality, then leave it for the next iteration. With these options set, curl sends JSON data in a POST request with the Content-Type header set to application/json. The REST API returns 201 CREATED along with the JSON for the new country you added. This response only includes the status code 204 No Content.
- As I mentioned during the documentation rule, try this out with people that are new to your API.
- Finally, the return jsonify line takes the list of results and renders them in the browser as JSON.
- Also, it suggests API versioning as a solution for changing formats and data types, but that should be done by versioning the media-type itself, which brings us to the rule about flexibility.
- Both specifications are designed for use with RESTful API architectures.
Services publishing event data for use by others must make the event schema as well as the event type definition available for review. Owners of APIs used in production should monitor API service to get information about its using clients. This information, for instance, is useful to identify potential review partner for API changes. If multiple elements are deprecated the Deprecation and Sunset headers are expected to be set to the earliest time stamp to reflect the shortest interval consumers are expected to get active. The optionalSunset time stamp carries the information when consumers latest have to stop using a feature. The sunset date should always offer an eligible time interval for switching to a replacement feature. API formats must not declare additionalProperties to be false, as this prevents objects being extended in the future.
Code First
The models are the data descriptor of our application, in many cases related to the database model. How each model is defined will heavily depend on the library you use to connect to your database. This article barely scratches the surface of REST, and there are some things mentioned that are debatable. I believe the one thing that is not debatable and is definitely just plain wrong, and very bad practice, is associating any of your design of your REST API with your underlying database. Your method of exposing your data to the outside needs to be completely independent of your database design.
Polyglot Microservices Communication Using Dapr on AKS – InfoQ.com
Polyglot Microservices Communication Using Dapr on AKS.
Posted: Thu, 20 Oct 2022 07:00:00 GMT [source]
To run this Flask application, you first need to set an environment variable called FLASK_APP to app.py. The fields name, capital, and area store data about a specific country somewhere in the world. The responses above work well when everything goes as planned, but what happens if there’s a problem with the request? In the next section, you’ll look at how your REST API should respond when errors occur. No matter what strategy you select, versioning your API is an important step to ensuring it can adapt to changing requirements while supporting existing users. The requests library is an awesome tool for working with REST APIs and an indispensable part of your Python tool belt. In the next section, you’ll change gears and consider what it takes to build a REST API.
Set the Content-Type Header for the Response
You also don’t have to write anything to pull the data out of the html in order to send it to the server. There is absolutely no relationship between following RESTful principles and formatting the messages as JSON. REST was originally designed for media file transfers and one of its guiding principles is that messages should be 100% self-describing. In that sense, no service that returns structured data where the consumer needs to have a specific understanding of the structure is actually RESTful. Still, there’s absolutely no reason to tie the RESTful principles to JSON.
Now that we understand how to name resources, we need to think about actions. There are methods in our APIs that are procedural by nature and are not python api design related to a specific resource, e.g., checkout, run, play, etc. An adequately designed API is easy and straightforward for developers to understand.
Characteristics of a Good API
One thing that bothers me on using standard HTTP status codes is the possible ambiguities that may arise. Assume a server application returns 404 to indicate a resource doesn’t exist. A client application which receives this 404, could in response call the corresponding POST endpoint to create such resource. That would be OK, until we added a piece of infrastructure, such as nginx or HAProxy, between client and server.
A straightforward way to create a unique identifier for an event is to generate a UUID value. However, event producers need to ensure that retried attempts to publish an event, e.g. as a mitigation of temporary Nakadi or network failures, use the same event identifier as the initial attempt. Timestamp of when the event was received via the API event post endpoints.
Because they help users to quickly access information through your API, these elements—documentation and well-conceived URLs—are the sine qua non of a good API. We’ll discuss these elements in greater depth later in this tutorial. 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.
This blog will enable you to quickly understand and grasp RESTful concepts with a major concern on best practices and conventions. The ETag for every entity is returned as an additional property of that entity.