Book Image

RESTful Web API Design with Node.js - Second Edition

By : Valentin Bojinov
Book Image

RESTful Web API Design with Node.js - Second Edition

By: Valentin Bojinov

Overview of this book

In this era of cloud computing, every data provisioning solution is built in a scalable and fail-safe way. Thus, when building RESTful services, the right choice for the underlying platform is vital. Node.js, with its asynchronous, event-driven architecture, is exactly the right choice to build RESTful APIs. This book will help you enrich your development skills to create scalable, server-side, RESTful applications based on the Node.js platform. Starting with the fundamentals of REST, you will understand why RESTful web services are better data provisioning solution than other technologies. You will start setting up a development environment by installing Node.js, Express.js, and other modules. Next, you will write a simple HTTP request handler and create and test Node.js modules using automated tests and mock objects. You will then have to choose the most appropriate data storage type, having options between a key/value or document data store, and also you will implement automated tests for it. This module will evolve chapter by chapter until it turns into a full-fledged and secure Restful service.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
RESTful Web API Design with Node.js - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Linking


Now that Version 2 of the contact service supports two data formats: JSON for storing contacts and binary format for storing an image file associated with a contact, we need to ensure that these data formats are not mixed. In the previous section, Working with arbitrary data, the information stored for a contact was extended with an additional file entry in MongoDB that stored the binary representation of a JPEG image.

However, none of the JSON models in previously exposed routes, /v2/contacts or /v2/contacts/{primary-number}, adopted that change, and the image was exposed in a new route:/v2/contacts/{primary-number|}/image. That was done intentionally, and keeping backward compatibility was not the main reason for that decision. Mixing literally encoded and binary data in one format is never a good idea. It increases the complexity of the application and makes it error-prone. Thus, we would want to prevent a JSON representation of a contact from looking like this:

{
  "firstname...