Rest Best Practices

1
REST

• REST, or REpresentational State Transfer, is an
  architectural style for providing standards
  between computer systems on the web, making it
  easier for systems to communicate with each
  other.
• We use REST primarily as a way to communicate
  between computer systems on the World Wide Web
  with JSON.

2
REST vs HTTP

• REST is an architectural style and not the
  standard.
• HTTP is a protocol to transfer hyper-text.
• Provides a lot of freedom to implement various
  design best practices.
• Flexibility to use some other application
  protocol with REST
• GET, POST, PUT, DELETE
• GET is meant to perform read a resource.
• POST is used to create a new resource.
• PUT is used to update an existing resource.
• DELETE is for deleting an existing resource.

3
HATEOAS

• Hypermedia As The Engine Of Application State
• Provide specific response for a request and
  hypermedia links to related endpoints and thus
  decouple the design

4
HATEOS Sample
5
RESTful API

• Works on client-server architecture
• Does not maintain states between two consecutive
  request.
• Provides flexibility, scalability over
  distributed system
• Concrete is better than Abstract
• Here is an example of creating REST endpoints
  with Spring - https//www.devglan.com/spring-boot/
  spring-boot-angular-example

6
URI Formatting

• Resources are Nouns, Not Verbs
• HTTP methods are verbs
• Singular vs Plural
• /getAllUsers
• /updateUser/userId
• /updateUserArticle/articleId

7
Error Handling

• Maintain uniformity
• Should include message, status_code, type
• An Example - https//www.devglan.com/spring-securi
  ty/exception-handling-in-spring-security

8
Status Codes

• 1XX Informational
• Communicates transfer protocol-level
  information.
• 2XX Success
• Indicates that the clients request was accepted
  successfully.
• 3XX Redirection
• Indicates that the client must take some
  additional action in order to complete their
  request.
• 4XX - Client Error
• 5XX Server Error

9
Security

• Some useful resource to secure REST endpoints.
• https//www.devglan.com/spring-security/spring-web
  flux-rest-authentication

10
Versioning

• https//api.example.com/v1/authors/2/blogposts/13

11
Documentation

• Swagger