Reading Notes for Day 8 of 301:

Readings: APIs

Reading API Design Best Practices

• What does REST stand for?

  Representational State Transfer

• REST APIs are designed around a __.

  Resource. That would be an object, data or service that can be accessed by the client.

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

  It would be a URI that allows the client to find the resource, for example:

  https://great-food.com/recipies/meatballs_1 might give the client access to the first meatball recipe in the api. And now I’m hungry for Italian.

• What are the most common HTTP verbs?

  GET, POST, PUT PATCH and DELETE

• What should the URIs be based on?

The resource and not operations on the resource.

• Give an example of a good URI.

prettythings/dresses

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

API’s that send back a lot of small responses, and no, they take up too many resources. Best to info dump and let the client sort it out.

• What status code does a successful GET request return?

200

• What status code does an unsuccessful GET request return?

204

• What status code does a successful POST request return?

201

• What status code does a successful DELETE request return?

204

Bookmark and Review

RegExr - Pay particular attention to the cheatsheet Regex Tutorial Regex 101

Things I want to know more about:

There’s just a lot here. I am scratching the surface of RESTFul design. Turns out it has nothing to do with good visuals.