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

Modularizing code


What we have developed so far is a simple HTTP server application that listens and processes known request types; however, it is not so well structured, as the functions handling the requests are not reusable. Node.js supports modules embracing code isolation and reusability.

Note

A user-defined module is a logical unit consisting of one or more related functions. The module can export one or more functions to other components while keeping other functions visible only to itself.

We will rework our HTTP server application in such a way that the entire request handling functionality will be wrapped in a module. The module will export only a generic handler function that will take a request object as argument and, based on its request type, it will delegate the handling to inner functions not visible outside the module.

Let's start by creating a new module directory within our project. We will refactor our previous source file by extracting the following functions to a new http...