Principles of Designing RESTful APIs

Since we described what REST is in the previous chapter, we will now go over best practices for REST and RESTful APIs. In the upcoming chapters, we are going to create our own web services. Since we have already learned how to simplify operations, how to organize endpoints, and how to name and perform code standardization, this chapter will help you understand the planning part easily. Before you start coding, we will give you a brief overview of what type of decisions you need to make while creating APIs.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Organizing API endpoints
• Different ways to expose an API service
• Working with large datasets
• Naming conventions
• HTTP status codes
• API versioning