Summary of points about good RESTful API design from below talk:
Definition: Representational state transfer (REST) or RESTful Web services are one way of providing interoperability between computer systems on the Internet. REST-compliant Web services allow requesting systems to access and manipulate textual representations of Web resources using a uniform and predefined set of stateless operations
https://blog.apigee.com/detail/restful_api_design
1) 2 base urls
a) for collection (/dogs)
b) for a single element (/dogs/bo)
2) POST, GET, PUT, DELETE
3) nouns are good, verbs are bad
4) Assocations GET /owners/bob/dogs
5) Complex Associations – Sweep under the carpet (behind the question mark)
(/dogs?state=barking&color=red)
6) pagination (offset, limit or start, count)
7) searching ( global: /search?q=fluffy+dog , scoped: /owners/bob/dogs/search?q=fluffy+dog)
8) versioning (as far to the left as possible)
9) give me exactly what i need
- a) /people:(id,first_name,last_name)
- b) ?fields=id,first_name,last_name
10) output format
- a) /venue.json
- b) ?output=json
11) Standardize Error Formats
12) Make dog to bark (/dog?event=bark)