REST Endpoint Best Practices Every Developer Should Know
<p><strong>REST </strong>(Representational State Transfer) is an architectural style for designing networked applications, and adhering to its principles is crucial for creating <strong>scalable</strong>, <strong>maintainable</strong>, and <strong>efficient </strong>web services. In this blog post, we’ll delve into best practices for designing REST endpoints, complete with examples, to help you build robust and user-friendly APIs.</p>
<p>REST services have no strict naming rule and we are free to implement them the way we want, however, there are certain guidelines that ensure that our REST API is <strong>Simple to read,</strong> <strong>Consistent </strong>and<strong> intuitive.</strong></p>
<h2>Keep it Simple</h2>
<p>This is not specific to resource naming guidelines but an important concept while designing your API. Our REST API naming should be <strong>self-describing</strong> and as <strong>simple </strong>as possible. One of the important principles while naming our API is to allow developers to work on it without referring to the documents for every point.</p>
<pre>
/api/users/12345
/api?type=user&id=12345 </pre>
<p>Looking at the second example, it is not clear what we are trying to do until we look at the type and id fields together.</p>
<h2>Use Plural Nouns for Naming For RESTful URI</h2>
<p>A key principle of designing RESTful endpoints is using nouns to represent resources and using <strong>plural names for consistency.</strong> This makes your API more intuitive and easy to understand. <strong>Remember to avoid using verbs or actions</strong> in your endpoint names, as the HTTP methods already convey the action.</p>
<p>As one of the most common operations performed by the REST API is to get data, using plural is more intuitive and easy.</p>
<p><a href="https://medium.com/@ionut-anghel/rest-endpoint-best-practices-every-developer-should-know-24b0c1d0088f">Visit Now</a></p>