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.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.

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