Grokking the Frontend System Design Interview/

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API Design and Data Model for the Newsfeed System

API Design and Data Model for the Newsfeed System

Explore key design considerations and gain an understanding of the API design and data models used in the newsfeed system.

We'll cover the following...

API design and data modeling are fundamental to a well-structured newsfeed system. The API serves as the communication layer between the frontend and backend, facilitating efficient data exchange, while the data model defines how information is structured, stored, and retrieved. A well-designed API ensures seamless interactions, while an optimized data model enhances performance, scalability, and maintainability. They create a robust foundation for delivering a responsive and scalable newsfeed experience.

Before diving into those, let’s look at this lesson’s structure:

Section

What We Covered

API architectural styles

  • Choosing a suitable API architectural style for the newsfeed system.

HTTP protocols

  • Selecting a suitable HTTP protocol for the newsfeed system.

Data formats

  • Deciding on the most suitable data format, i.e., JSON, XML, binary, etc.

Data fetching patterns

  • Choosing an efficient data fetching pattern for optimized performance.

API endpoints

  • Understanding API URLs through which the frontend communicates with the backend.

API endpoints: Discuss data model, API design, request, and response format

  • Create a post

  • Rate a post

  • Generate a newsfeed

  • Create a comment

  • Follow/unfollow

Architectural style

API architectural styles determine how the frontend retrieves and interacts with data. We’ll explore three prominent styles and evaluate them in the context of a newsfeed:

  • REST: It is the most commonly used architectural style for APIs due to its simplicity and adherence to HTTP standards. It uses endpoints like GET /posts or POST /comments to fetch and update resources.

  • GraphQL: GraphQL allows clients to request the data they need with a single query. For instance, a single query can retrieve all related data instead of fetching posts and comments in separate calls.

Note: We’ll choose REST for the newsfeed system due to its simplicity, scalability, and efficient handling of paginated content. Its stateless nature enables seamless horizontal scaling, while built-in HTTP caching and CDN support optimize performance. REST’s predictable resource structure makes pagination, prefetching, and caching straightforward, ensuring an efficient and scalable newsfeed experience.

HTTP protocol

Selecting the right HTTP protocol is crucial for optimizing client and server communication. A newsfeed system’s request and response often consist of text-based posts, media files, or links to images and videos. While HTTP/1.1 works for basic sequential request-response communication, it can lead to bottlenecks when multiple assets need to be fetched simultaneously.

However, to upload and retrieve multiple media files, HTTP/2 is a better choice due to its support for multiplexing, enabling concurrent requests over a single connection, and its header compression ...