Book Image

RESTful Web API Design with Node.js 10 - Third Edition

By : Valentin Bojinov
Book Image

RESTful Web API Design with Node.js 10 - Third Edition

By: Valentin Bojinov

Overview of this book

When building RESTful services, it is really important to choose the right framework. Node.js, with its asynchronous, event-driven architecture, is exactly the right choice for building RESTful APIs. This third edition of RESTful Web API Design with Node.js 10 will teach you to create scalable and rich RESTful applications based on the Node.js platform. You will be introduced to the latest NPM package handler and understand how to use it to customize your RESTful development process. You will begin by understanding the key principle that makes an HTTP application a RESTful-enabled application. After writing a simple HTTP request handler, you will create and test Node.js modules using automated tests and mock objects; explore using the NoSQL database, MongoDB, to store data; and get to grips with using self-descriptive URLs. You’ll learn to set accurate HTTP status codes along with understanding how to keep your applications backward-compatible. Also, while implementing a full-fledged RESTful service, you will use Swagger to document the API and implement automation tests for a REST-enabled endpoint with Mocha. Lastly, you will explore some authentication techniques to secure your application.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 3. Building a Typical Web API

Our first draft API will be a read-only version and will not support creating or updating items in the catalog as real-world applications do. Instead, we will concentrate on the API definition itself, and will worry about data storage later on. Of course, using file storage for data exposed to millions of users is anything but an option, so a database layer will be provided to our application further in the book, after we have looked into modern NoSQL database solutions.

We will also cover the topic of content negotiation, a mechanism that allows consumers to specify the expected format of requested data. Finally, we will take a look at several ways to expose different versions of a service, in case it evolves in a backward-incompatible way.

To sum up, in this chapter, you will learn the following:

  • How to specify a web API
  • How to implement routes
  • How to query your API
  • Content negotiation
  • API versioning

After this chapter, you should be able to completely specify...