Book Image

Hands-On RESTful Web Services with TypeScript 3

By : Biharck Muniz Araújo
5 (1)
Book Image

Hands-On RESTful Web Services with TypeScript 3

5 (1)
By: Biharck Muniz Araújo

Overview of this book

In the world of web development, leveraging data is the key to developing comprehensive applications, and RESTful APIs help you to achieve this systematically. This book will guide you in designing and developing web services with the power of TypeScript 3 and Node.js. You'll design REST APIs using best practices for request handling, validation, authentication, and authorization. You'll also understand how to enhance the capabilities of your APIs with ODMs, databases, models and views, as well as asynchronous callbacks. This book will guide you in securing your environment by testing your services and initiating test automation with different testing approaches. Furthermore, you'll get to grips with developing secure, testable, and more efficient code, and be able to scale and deploy TypeScript 3 and Node.js-powered RESTful APIs on cloud platforms such as the Google Cloud Platform. Finally, the book will help you explore microservices and give you an overview of what GraphQL can allow you to do. By the end of this book, you will be able to use RESTful web services to create your APIs for mobile and web apps and other platforms.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Unraveling API Design
5
Section 2: Developing RESTful Web Services
10
Section 3: Enhancing RESTful Web Services
15
Section 4: Extending the Capabilities of RESTful Web Services

What is REST?

RESTful web services are services built according to REST principles. The idea is to have them designed to essentially work well on the web. Alright, but what is REST? Let's start from the beginning, that is, by defining REST.

The REST style is a set of software engineering practices that contains constraints that should be used in order to create web services in distributed hypermedia systems. REST is not a tool and neither is it a language; in fact, REST is agnostic of protocols, components, and languages.

It is important to say that REST is an architectural style and not a toolkit. REST provides a set of design rules in order to create stateless services that are shown as resources and, in some cases, sources of specific information such as data and functionality. The identification of each resource is performed by its unique Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). REST describes simple interfaces that transmit data over a standardized interface such as HTTP and HTTPS without any additional messaging layer, such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP).

The consumer will access REST resources via a URI using HTTP methods (this will be explained in more detail later). After the request, it is expected that a representation of the requested resource is returned. The representation of any resource is, in general, a document that reflects the current or intended state of the requested resource.