RESTful services have become the de facto standard data feed providers for social services, news feeds, and mobile devices. They deliver a large amount of data to millions of users. Thus, they need to address high-availability requirements, such as reliability and scalability. This book will show you how to utilize the Node.js platform to implement a robust and performant data service. By the end of this book, you will have learned how to implement a real-life RESTful service, taking advantage of the modern NoSQL database to serve both JSON and binary content.
Important topics such as correct URI structuring and security features are also covered, with detailed examples, showing you everything you need to know to start implementing the robust RESTful APIs that serve content for your applications.
Chapter 1, REST – What You Didn't Know, introduces the history of REST and how it couples with the HTTP protocol.
Chapter 2, Getting Started with Node.js, teaches you how to install Node.js and work with its package manager to install modules. It is in this chapter that you develop your first HTTP server application.
Chapter 3, Building a Typical Web API, takes you through structuring your application using human-readable URL and URI parameters. You get to develop a read-only RESTful service application using the filesystem for storage.
Chapter 4, Using NoSQL Databases, showcases how to use the LevelDB and MongoDB NoSQL databases, and explains the difference between key-value and document data stores.
Chapter 5, Implementing a Full-fledged RESTful Service, takes you through implementing a production-ready RESTful service that uses NoSQL to store its data. You get to learn how to handle binary data and how to version an API while it evolves.
Chapter 6, Keeping the Bad Guys Out, covers restricting access to your data by choosing an appropriate authentication approach. Now you can protect data leakage with transport layer security.
The following pieces of software are used throughout the book:
Node.js (http://www.nodejs.org/)
Enide developer studio or the Nodeclipse plugin for the Eclipse IDE (http://www.nodeclipse.org/enide/studio/)
SoapUI (http://www.soapui.org)
OpenSSL (http://www.openssl.org)
The Nodeclipse plugin (http://www.nodeclipse.org)
The NPM package manager (https://www.npmjs.org/)
If you are a Java developer wanting to enrich your development skills to create scalable, server-side RESTful applications based on the Node.js platform, this book is for you. You also need to be aware of the concepts of HTTP communication, and you should have working knowledge of JavaScript. Knowledge of REST will be an added advantage but is definitely not a necessity.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "This tells npm that our package depends on the url and express modules."
A block of code is set as follows:
app.get('/contacts/:number', cors(), function(request, response) {
response.setHeader('content-type', 'application/json');
response.end(JSON.stringify(contacts.query(request.params.number)));
});New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Select File | New | Node.js Project and enter the name of your first project"
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