REST APIs play a crucial role in facilitating communication in servers. Follow best practices when designing REST APIS to avoid errors.

REST API, an acronym for representational state transfer, is an architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems. It is a flexible method of designing APIs in a way that follows a certain protocol.

A REST API enables the client to communicate with the server by transferring states of data stored mainly in a database. Because clients and servers work independently, we need some interface that can facilitate communication between them. A client sends a request to the server via the API, which returns the response in a standardized format like JSON or XML.

REST APIs play a crucial role in facilitating communication in servers, so it is critical for a developer to have a deep understanding of how to use them. An error-prone API causes huge functional issues for the client and makes the software less appealing altogether.

In this article, we’ll take a deeper look at the best practices for designing REST APIs to ensure the best performance possible.

Best practices for optimizing your REST API

• Use JSON for sending and receiving data
• Use nouns instead of verbs
• Use plurals for collections
• Don’t ignore error handling
• Filter the data
• Keep the security tight
• Automate caching
• Assign proper API versioning
• Use nesting for showing relationships
• Provide API documentation

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