A really simple overview of what is REST APIs

1. Rest for the Web!
The new buzzword in town
Nitesh Oswal
www.niteshoswal.me

2. APIs: What & Why?

3. What is an API?
Application Programming Interface
An API is the interface implemented by
an application which allows us to
communicate with it.

4. What is REST?
REpresentational State Transfer
●
Architectural Style
●
Not a standard, unlike SOAP
●
Modern best practice
●
Developed closely with HTTP 1.1

5. Constraints
●
Client – Server Independance
●
Stateless
●
Cacheable
●
Layered System
●
Code in demand
●
Uniform Interface

6. Examples
●
Twitter
●
Dropbox
●
Instagram
●
Github
●
Paypal
●
Soundcloud
●
Google+
●
...

7. Trends
Source: http://blog.programmableweb.com/2011/03/08/3000-web-apis/
3,000 Web APIs: Trends From a Quickly Growing Directory

8. REST APIs: ?
Any API which conforms with the REST
constraints for data transfer is called a
REST API!

9. Top 3 Qualities
●
Intuitive
–
●
No surprises, easy to learn
Documented
–
–
●
Simple answers to simple questions
References, tutorials & quick start guides
Opinionated
–
CamelCase, ids, responses, paginated etc.

10. Resources,
Representations,
Metadata

11. Resource
●
Nouns not verbs
●
Could be any information
●
They tell you what they ‘are’

12. Representation
●
Sequence of bytes
●
Described by representation metadata
●
Less precisely, a document, an entity, or an
instance

13. Embrace HTTP
●
GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE
●
Explorable with simple tools

14. Embrace HTTP
GET /document
GET /document/1
POST /document
PUT /document/1
DELETE /document/1
Retrieve all documents
Retrieve a specific
document #1
Create a new document
Update an existing
document #1
Delete an existing
document #1

15. Example

16. Best Practices
security
Https!
base URLs
api.mycompany.com
serialization
json
timestamps
ISO 8601 & UTC
caching
Etag & Last modified
gzip
Always & pretty print responses
versioning
/v1/ OR /v1.1/

17. Questions?

18. Thank you