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

Summary


In this chapter, we dived into some more complex topics. Let's sum up what we covered. We started by specifying the operations of our web API and defined that an operation is a combination of a URI and HTTP action. Next, we implemented routes and bound them to an operation. Then, we requested each operation using the Postman REST client to request the URIs that we routed. In the content negotiation section, we handled the Accept HTTP header to provide the results in the format requested by consumers.  Finally, we covered the topic of API versions, which allow us to develop backward-compatible APIs.

We used old-fashioned filesystem storage for our data in this chapter. This is not suitable for a web application. Thus, we will look into modern, scalable, and reliable NoSQL storage in the next chapter.