
But for text and numbers, we don’t need form data to transfer those since-with most frameworks-we can transfer JSON by just getting the data from it directly on the client side. It ends up being a lot of extra work just to do normal data transfer.įorm data is good for sending data, especially if we want to send files. We can’t manipulate this data as easily on the client-side, especially in browsers. XML isn’t widely supported by frameworks without transforming the data ourselves to something that can be used, and that’s usually JSON. Server-side technologies have libraries that can decode JSON without doing much work. Almost every networked technology can use it: JavaScript has built-in methods to encode and decode JSON either through the Fetch API or another HTTP client. JSON is the standard for transferring data. REST APIs should accept JSON for request payload and also send responses to JSON. Note: For REST APIs called over the internet, you’ll like want to follow the best practices for REST API authentication. While REST APIs can be accessed through a number of communication protocols, most commonly, they are called over HTTPS, so the guidelines below apply to REST API endpoints that will be called over the internet. Allow filtering, sorting, and paginationĪ REST API is an application programming interface that conforms to specific architectural constraints, like stateless communication and cacheable data.Handle errors gracefully and return standard error codes.Nesting resources for hierarchical objects.Use nouns instead of verbs in endpoint paths.
Rest web service how to#
In this article, we’ll look at how to design REST APIs to be easy to understand for anyone consuming them, future-proof, and secure and fast since they serve data to clients that may be confidential. If we don’t follow commonly accepted conventions, then we confuse the maintainers of the API and the clients that use them since it’s different from what everyone expects. Otherwise, we create problems for clients that use our APIs, which isn’t pleasant and detracts people from using our API. We have to take into account security, performance, and ease of use for API consumers. Therefore, it’s very important to design REST APIs properly so that we won’t run into problems down the road. They allow various clients including browser apps to communicate with a server via the REST API. REST APIs are one of the most common kinds of web services available today.
