REST API Good Practices - nthieu29/icommerce GitHub Wiki

REST API Request

The primary used HTTP verbs are GET, POST, PUT and DELETE.

• GET: Get a list of resources or a single resources.
• POST: Create a new resource.
• PUT: Update/Replace an existing resource.
• DELETE: Delete an existing resource.

We should define our URIs for our service following:

• GET http://localhost:8080/restapi/books - Return a list of all Books.
• GET http://localhost:8080/restapi/books/1 - Return the Book whose ID is 1.
• POST http://localhost:8080/restapi/books - Create a new Book resource.
• PUT http://localhost:8080/restapi/books/1 - Update the Book whose ID is 1.
• DELETE http://localhost:8080/restapi/books/1 - Delete the Book whose ID is 1.

REST API Response

There are really only 3 outcomes in the interaction between an app and an API:

• Everything worked.
• The application did something wrong.
• The API did something wrong.

So we usually use 3 following HTTP codes for the responses:

• 2xx - Successful responses
• 4xx - Client errors - A json with error/more details should return to the client.
• 5xx - Server-side errors - A json with an error should return to the client only when there is no security risk by doing that.