RESTful Web API Design with Node.js 10 - Third Edition

To understand this principle, one must conceive of the idea of representing data by a specific format and not by a physical file containing a bunch of bytes. Each piece of data available on the internet has a format that describes it, known as the content type; for example, JPEG images, MPEG videos, HTML, XML, text documents, and binary data are all resources with the following content types: image/jpeg, video/mpeg, text/html, text/xml, and application/octet-stream.

Since the internet contains so many different resources, they all should be accessible via URIs and should be identified uniquely. Furthermore, the URIs can be in a human-readable format, despite the fact that their consumers are more likely to be software programs rather than ordinary humans.

Human-readable URIs keep data self-descriptive and ease further development against it. This helps you to keep the risk of logical errors in your programs to a minimum.

Here are a few sample examples of such URIs representing different resources in a catalog application:

These human-readable URIs expose different types of resources in a straightforward manner. In the preceding example URIs, it is quite clear the data is items in a catalog, which are categorized watches. The first link shows all the items in the category. The second shows only the ones that are part of the 2018 collection. Next is a link pointing to the image of the item, followed by a link to a sample video. The last link points to a resource containing items from the previous collection in a ZIP archive. The media types served per each URI are rather easy to identify, with the assumption that the data format of an item is either JSON or XML, so we can easily map the media type of a self-described URL to one of the following:

The native HTTP protocol (RFC 2616) defines eight actions, also known as HTTP verbs:

The first four of them just feel natural in the context of resources, especially when defining actions for data manipulation. Let's make a parallel with relative SQL databases where the native language for data manipulation isCRUD(short forCreate, Read, Update, and Delete), originating from the different types of SQL statements, INSERT,SELECT,UPDATE, andDELETE, respectively. In the same manner, if you apply the REST principles correctly, the HTTP verbs should be used as shown here:

Note that a resource might be created by either the POST or PUT HTTP verbs, based on the policy of an application. However, if a resource has to be created under a specific URI with an identifier provided by the client, then PUT is the appropriate action:

PUT /categories/watches/model-abc HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: text/xml
Host: www.mycatalog.com

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Item category="watch">
    <Brand>...</Brand>
    </Price></Price>
</Item>

HTTP/1.1 201 Created 
Content-Type: text/xml 
Location: http://www.mycatalog.com/categories/watches/model-abc

However, in your application, you may want to leave it up to the backend RESTful service to decide where to expose the newly created resource, and thus create it under an appropriate but still unknown or non-existent location.

For instance, in our example, we might want the server to define the identifier of newly created items. In such cases, just use the POST verb to a URL without providing an identifier parameter. Then it is up to the service itself to provide a new unique and valid identifier for the new resource and to expose back this URL via the Location header of the response:

POST /categories/watches HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: text/xml
Host: www.mycatalog.com

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Item category="watch">
    <Brand>...</Brand>
    </Price></Price>
</Item>

HTTP/1.1 201 Created 
Content-Type: text/xml 
Location: http://www.mycatalog.com/categories/watches/model-abc

A key feature of a resource is that it may be represented in a different format from the one in which it is stored. Thus, it can be requested or created in different representations. As long as the specified format is supported, the REST-enabled endpoint should use it. In the preceding example, we posted an XML representation of a watch item, but if the server had supported the JSON format, the following request would have been valid as well:

POST /categories/watches HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/json
Host: www.mycatalog.com

{
  "watch": {
    "id": ""watch-abc"",
    "brand": "...",
    "price": {
      "-currency": "EUR",
      "#text": "100"
    }
  }
}
HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Content-Type: application/json
Location: http://mycatalog.com/categories/watches/watch-abc   

Resource manipulation operations through HTTP requests should always be considered atomic. All modifications of a resource should be carried out within an HTTP request in an isolated manner. After the request execution, the resource is left in a final state; this implicitly means that partial resource updates are not supported. You should always send the complete state of the resource.

Back to our catalog example, updating the price field of a given item would mean making a PUT request with a complete document (JSON or XML) that contains the entire data, including the updated price field. Posting only the updated price is not stateless, as it implies that the application is aware that the resource has a price field, that is, it knows its state.

Another requirement for your RESTful application to be stateless is that once the service gets deployed on a production environment, it is likely that incoming requests are served by a load balancer, ensuring scalability and high availability. Once exposed via a load balancer, the idea of keeping your application state at server side gets compromised. This doesn't mean that you are not allowed to keep the state of your application. It just means that you should keep it in a RESTful way. For example, keep a part of the state within the URI, or use HTTP headers to provide additional state-related data

The statelessness of your RESTful API isolates the caller against changes at the server side. Thus, the caller is not expected to communicate with the same server in consecutive requests. This allows easy application of changes within the server infrastructure, such as adding or removing nodes.

Now that you know that REST is around 18 years old, a sensible question would be, "Why has it become so popular just quite recently?" Well, we the developers usually reject simple, straightforward approaches and, most of the time, prefer spending more time on turning already-complex solutions into even more complex and sophisticated ones.

Take classical SOAP web services, for example. Their various WS-* specifications are so many, and sometimes so loosely defined, that in order to make different solutions from different vendors interoperable, a separate specification, WS-Basic Profile, has been introduced. It defines extra interoperability rules in order to ensure that all WS-* specifications in SOAP-based web services can work together.

When it comes to transporting binary data with classical web services over HTTP, things get even more complex, as SOAP-based web services provide different ways of transporting binary data. Each way is defined in other sets of specifications, such as SOAP withAttachment References (SwaRef) and Message TransmissionOptimization Mechanism (MTOM). All this complexity was caused mainly because the initial idea of the web service was to execute business logic remotely, not to transport large amounts of data.

The real world has shown us that, when it comes to data transfer, things should not be that complex. This is where REST fits into the big picture—by introducing the concept of resources and a standard means for manipulating them.

A resource is just a set of information, and as defined by principle 4, it can have multiple representations; however, its state is atomic. It is up to the caller to specify the desired media type with the Accept header in the HTTP request, and then it is up to the server application to handle the representation accordingly, returning the appropriate content type of the resource together with a relevant HTTP status code:

Let's assume that, at server side, we have items resources stored in an XML format. We can have an API that allows a consumer to request the item resources in various formats, such as application/xml, application/json, application/zip, application/octet-stream, and so on.

It would be up to the API itself to load the requested resource, transform it into the requested type (for example, JSON or XML), and either use ZIP to compress it or directly flush it to the HTTP response output.

The caller would make use of the Accept HTTP header to specify the media type of the response they expect. So, if we want to request our item data inserted in the previous section in XML format, the following request should be executed:

GET /category/watches/watch-abc HTTP/1.1 
Host: my-computer-hostname 
Accept: text/xml 
 
HTTP/1.1 200 OK 
Content-Type: text/xml 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Item category="watch">
    <Brand>...</Brand>
    </Price></Price>
</Item>

To request the same item in JSON format, the Accept header needs to be set to application/json:

GET /categoery/watches/watch-abc HTTP/1.1 
Host: my-computer-hostname 
Accept: application/json 
 
HTTP/1.1 200 OK 
Content-Type: application/json 
{
  "watch": {
    "id": ""watch-abc"",
    "brand": "...",
    "price": {
      "-currency": "EUR",
      "#text": "100"
    }
  }
}

REST is designed to be visible and simple. Visibility of the service means that every aspect of it should self-descriptive and follow the natural HTTP language according to principles 3, 4, and 5.

Visibility in the context of the outer world would mean that monitoring applications would be interested only in the HTTP communication between the REST service and the caller. Since the requests and responses are stateless and atomic, nothing more is needed to flow the behavior of the application and to understand whether anything has gone wrong.

Before talking about reliability, we need to define which HTTP methods are safe and which are idempotent in the REST context. So, let's first define what safe and idempotent methods are:

The following table lists which HTTP methods are safe and which are idempotent:

Consumers should consider operation's safety and the idempotence features in order to be served reliably.

So far, we stressed the importance of having stateless behavior for a RESTful web application. The World Wide Web (WWW) is an enormous universe, containing huge amount of data and a lot of users, eager to get that data. The evolution of the WWW has brought the requirement that applications should scale easily as their load increases. Scaling applications that have a state is difficult to achieve, especially when zero or close-to-zero operational downtime is expected.

That's why staying stateless is crucial for any application that needs to scale. In the best-case scenario, scaling your application would require you to put another piece of hardware for a load balancer, or bring another instance in your cloud environment. There would be no need for the different nodes to sync between each other, as they should not care about the state at all. Scalability is all about serving all your clients in an acceptable amount of time. Its main idea is to keep your application running and to prevent Denial of Service (DoS) caused by a huge amount of incoming requests.

Scalability should not be confused with the performance of an application. Performance is measured by the time needed for a single request to be processed, not by the total number of requests that the application can handle. The asynchronous non-blocking architecture and event-driven design of Node.js make it a logical choice for implementing an application that scales and performs well.

The best part of developing and distributing RESTful applications is that the infrastructure needed is already out there, available to you. As RESTful applications use the existing web space heavily, you need to do nothing more than follow the REST principles when developing. In addition, there are plenty of libraries available out there for any platform, and I do mean any platform. This eases the development of RESTful applications, so you just need to choose your preferred platform and start developing.