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

Extensibility and versioning


We've already defined a few basic versioning rules in Chapter 3, Building a Typical Web API. Let's apply them to the MongoDB database-aware module we implemented in the previous chapter. Our starting point would be to enable the current consumers of the API to continue using the same version on a different URL. This will keep them backward-compatible until they adopt and successfully test the new version.

Keeping a REST API stable is not a question of only moving one endpoint from one URI to another. It makes no sense to perform redirection and afterward have an API that behaves differently. Thus, we need to ensure that the behavior of the moved endpoint stays the same. To ensure that we don't change the previously implemented behavior, let's move the current behavior from the catalog.js module to a new module by renaming the file to catalogV1.js. Then, make a copy of it to the  catalogV2.js module, where we will introduce all new functionality; but before doing...