API Design and Documentation
Explore the fundamentals of designing and documenting REST APIs effectively. Understand how to use HTTP verbs, resource-based URLs, proper status codes, API versioning, and tools like Swagger or Postman for documentation. This lesson equips you with foundational principles to build scalable, clear, and maintainable APIs.
API stands for application programming interface, and REST stands for REpresentational State Transfer. A REST API is a way for two systems to communicate with each other, and it’s the most popular type of API used today.
When building a web service, which is exactly what we are doing, a developer inevitably designs and documents REST APIs at some point. Now mastering the world of API design is tricky and tedious. There is a lot to learn and much of it is passionately debated among enthusiasts frequently. But if we were to dip our toes in and get started with it, where would we even begin? Well, right here, friend!
Key points to consider
Let us go through some of the key considerations to keep in mind while designing REST APIs.
Use HTTP verbs
REST APIs should use HTTP verbs—GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc.—to indicate the requested action. For example, GET should be used to retrieve a resource, while POST should be used to create a new resource.