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RESTful APIs in practice

The Pure Doctrine

Article from ADMIN 41/2017

By Marcus Nasarek

Internet providers often market their open interfaces as RESTful, but is this true of the APIs, especially when no standard exists? We introduce some REST providers and look at how closely their API architectures reflect the REST principle.

REST (representational state transfer) is a design principle applied to programming interfaces. Not so much a specific standard, it is rather a collection of guidelines for the design of web interfaces. REST is committed to the consistent use of hypermedia to scale a web service to the max and make it as flexible as possible. In the previous issue, I devoted an article to the theoretical superstructure of REST [1].

Once you have learned the principle, it is easy to familiarize yourself with new REST interfaces. Providers benefit from REST when they propagate open interfaces as soon as possible, thus making them attractive to many developers.

However, a RESTful API requires discipline in its design, which causes some providers to take shortcuts through proprietary formats and function calls. Integrating standards takes time, and not every developer or every company is enthralled with the idea of having to supplement documentation or add abstraction steps, especially as applications become more complex, requiring developers to put more effort into representing each relevant application state via unique URLs.

On Your Marks!

To make sure I compare like with like, I briefly introduce the central concepts of a RESTful API. The crux of a RESTful service is the resource, which can be a file, a database record, a certain application state, or an intermediate step in the program sequence. Rather than passing this resource directly to the interface, the developer accesses a generalized representation of it.

This indirect route via a representation is another important element of REST. The Rails framework and object-oriented programming (OOP) embody this principle. They also collect an additional presentation layer that neatly separates a user perspective and the application logic. From a database entry, Rails makes a model (or an

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