REST Endpoint Best Practices Every Developer Should Know

<p><strong>REST&nbsp;</strong>(Representational State Transfer) is an architectural style for designing networked applications, and adhering to its principles is crucial for creating&nbsp;<strong>scalable</strong>,&nbsp;<strong>maintainable</strong>, and&nbsp;<strong>efficient&nbsp;</strong>web services. In this blog post, we&rsquo;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&nbsp;<strong>Simple to read,</strong>&nbsp;<strong>Consistent&nbsp;</strong>and<strong>&nbsp;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&nbsp;<strong>self-describing</strong>&nbsp;and as&nbsp;<strong>simple&nbsp;</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&amp;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&nbsp;<strong>plural names for consistency.</strong>&nbsp;This makes your API more intuitive and easy to understand.&nbsp;<strong>Remember to avoid using verbs or actions</strong>&nbsp;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>