API Design Best Practices
06 Feb 2023Here are few things to consider while designing your APIs
Pagination & Filtering
When the api response has large set of data, you want to enable pagination to reduce the load on the system and improve api experience. With pagination, you can enable defined set of results for the api call and have the ability to paginate to next page of the result set.
Versioning
As you change your api, it’s important to version any breaking change to the contract so that your existing clients won’t be afected. Versioning is another best practices you want to implement if you will be working with an evolutionary api design and want to maintain compatibility for your clients
Using JSON
JSON is the standard for tranferring data. JavaScript has built-in methods to parse JSON quickly, and it is supported in almost all programming languages. For simplicity, APIs should accept JSON payloads and should return JSON as response.
Using nouns for endpoint paths
Endpoint paths should always be names in reference to the entity they represent. Endpoints paths should never be verbs because HTTP request itself provides the verb. eg. GET, PUT, DELETE, POST etc
Maintaining Security practices
As with any client-server communication, SSL/TLS security is a must if data is to be key encrypted and safe. Without it, data is at risk of being exposed.
Use Caching
Using Cache-Control headers will allow users to make effective use of cached data. Caching allows users to access data faster because it is stored locally, meaning another request to the server to retreive it is not needed
Implementing Timeouts
Timeouts cause a request to fail after a specified amount of time. This is useful when there is a network issue, and the request cannnot be completed, or a user sends too much data. Implementing timeouts allows the connection to close instead of remaining open
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