Chapter 1, Introduction to the Basics of RESTful Architecture, intends to refresh your understanding of a few fundamental concepts of the web, its architecture, and the way it is evolving, hoping to lay a firm foundation for RESTful service designs and applications. We will discuss World Wide Web layers and architecture, web API development models, and REST-based service communications. You will also be introduced to service-oriented and resource-oriented architecture principles and characteristics, then move on to the foundations of REST's principles, constraints, qualifiers, and goals.
Chapter 2, Design Strategy, Guidelines, and Best Practices, discusses a few essential API design guidelines, such as consistency, standardization, reusability, and accessibility through REST interfaces, aiming to equip API designers with better thought processes for their API modelling. Also, this chapter intends to introduce a few practices for better REST API implementations, along with a few common, but avoidable, mistakes of API strategies.
Chapter 3, Essential RESTful API Patterns, provides both information about the concepts and also practical code examples to do with common and fundamental design patterns of RESTful APIs, so that you can better understand and power your RESTful API services. As part of this chapter, you will learn a few common and essential API design patterns, such as content negotiation, URI templates, pagination, Unicode, and more, along with the code implementation of those patterns. Each pattern addresses the RESTful constraints, and helps you to ensure that these essential patterns are accounted for in your API designs and implementations.
Chapter 4, Advanced RESTful API Patterns, is the second part of our look at API design patterns, and intends to discuss a few advanced design patterns, versioning, backend for frontend, authorization, idempotence and its importance, and how to power APIs and delight customers with bulk operations APIs.
Chapter 5, Microservice API Gateways, mainly talks about the crucial contributions of API gateway solutions to making microservices vital to producing enterprise-scale, mission-critical, cloud-hosted, event-driven, production-grade, and business-centric applications. We discuss popular API gateway solutions in this chapter and also look at the implementation of an aggregation service through the API gateway.
Chapter 6, RESTful Services API Testing and Security, intends to take you on an API testing journey, looking at types of API tests, challenges in API testing, and security in API testing. You will get a glimpse of various API testing tools, API security tools, and frameworks, and also learn how you can expose any security issues and API vulnerabilities as part of API testing, quality, and security measures.
Chapter 7, RESTful Service Composition for Smart Applications, is specially crafted to tell you all about the contributions of the RESTful services paradigm toward designing, developing, and deploying next-generation microservices-centric and enterprise-scale applications. It looks at how RESTful services that are capable of finding and binding with one another results in process-aware, business-critical, and people-centric composite services. You will understand the need for service composition, various compositions methods such as orchestration and choreography, and also the use of hybrid versions of orchestration and choreography for smarter applications.
Chapter 8, RESTful API Design Tips, discusses the design patterns and best practices needed for building competent and compatible REST APIs that can easily keep up with technological and business changes. This chapter deals with the importance of APIs; API design patterns and best practices; API security guidelines; the various tools and associated platforms of API design, development, integration, security, and management; and trends in the API-driven digital world.
Chapter 9, A More In-depth View of the RESTful Services Paradigm, focuses on conveying the emerging techniques and tips for producing RESTful services and their corresponding APIs. We discuss methodologies such as software-defined and driven world, and emerging application types that help in quick and easy deployments of APIs. Also, this chapter discusses topics such as the REST paradigm for application modernization and integration, RESTful services for digital transformation and intelligence, and the best practices for REST-based microservices.
Chapter 10, Frameworks, Standard Languages, and Toolkits, introduces you to a few prominent frameworks that can come in handy when deciding on the right framework for your API development needs. It discusses a few prominent frameworks for app developers who want to kick-start their RESTful APIs and microservices with their acquainted programming languages. This chapter is an attempt to provide you with information on a few programming language-friendly frameworks so that you can pick the most suitable framework for your RESTful API development needs. Also, this chapter has a reference table for various frameworks and their supported languages, along with their prominent features.
Chapter 11, Legacy Modernization to Microservices-Centric Apps, discusses how microservices architectures (MSAs) are the way forward for modern applications that are highly nimble, versatile, and resilient. This chapter provides the reasons for legacy application modernization, delineating why applications have to be modernized to be migrated and run in cloud environments, discussing how the combination of microservices and containers is the best way to achieve legacy modernization, and detailing legacy modernization methodologies.