Notes on APIs

API Design Best Practices

• What does REST stand for?

Representational State Transfer.

• REST APIs are designed around a __.

resources, which are objects, data, or services that a client can access.

• What is an identifer of a resource? Give an example.

A URI that uniquely specifies the particular resource. For instance, the Cat article on Yamapedia (Yamas Wikipedia) could have an identifier of:

https://www.yamapedia.com/cat

• What are the most common HTTP verbs?

GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE.

• What should the URIs be based on?

The nouns that describe the specific resource (rather than the verbs that occurring regarding the resource).

• Give an example of a good URI.

Good example: https://www.yamapedia.com/cat-article Bad example: https://www.yamapedia.com/click-cat-pic

• What does it mean to have a ‘chatty’ web API? Is this a good or a bad thing?

A chatty web API is a bad thing because it can overload the server with multiple requests for data that could have been consolidated into a single request per user.

• What status code does a successful GET request return?

200 (OK)

• What status code does an unsuccessful GET request return?

404 (Not Found)

• What status code does a successful POST request return?

201 (Created)

• What status code does a successful DELETE request return?

204 (No Content)

Things I want to know more about

Look forward to learning more about filtering and paginating data, because that seems like it’ll be very useful.