Building RESTful web services, like other programming skills is part art, part science. As the Internet industry progresses, creating a REST API becomes more concrete with emerging best practices. As RESTful web services don’t follow a prescribed standard except for HTTP, it’s important to build your RESTful API in accordance with industry best practices to ease development and increase client adoption.
What is RESTful
REST is short for Representational State Transfer.
Briefly, RESTful is a style of creating web service, it has no technically constraints.
But there are a few recommended REST-like concepts. These six quick tips will result in better, more usable services.
six practical ways to make your web RESTful
1.Use HTTP Verbs to Make Your Requests Mean Something
2.Provide Sensible Resource Names
3.Use HTTP Response Codes to Indicate Status
4.Create Fine-Grained Resources
5.Offer Both JSON and XML
6.Consider Connectedness
4 HTTP Verbs
- GET
- POST
- PUT
- DELETE
The biggest difference between POST and PUT is that PUT is idempotent while POST isn’t idempotent.
Common HTTP Response Status Codes
-
200 OK
General success status code. This is the most common code. Used to indicate success. -
3XX Redirection
-
400 Bad Request
The request cannot be fulfilled due to bad syntax. -
403 Forbidden
The request was a legal request, but the server is refusing to respond to it. -
404 Not Found
The requested resource could not be found but may be available again in the future. -
500 Internal Server Error
The server encountered an unexpected condition which prevented it from fulfilling the request
