Building RESTful APIs
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Fundamentals of building a Restful API with Django and django-rest-framework. Intended for new developers interested in developing a REST API for their applications. Basic knowledge of Python is nice to have, but the concepts are transferable. Presented at Vancouver Python Day 2013.
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Building RESTful APIs
- 1. Building RESTful APIs Vancouver Python Day November 16, 2013 Ganesh Swami www.silota.com
- 2. Hi • Programming professionally for 10+ years • x86 assembly, STL, boost, python-boost, python ! • Built emacs-‐wiki-‐blog: first blogging engine for Emacs!
- 3. SILOTA • Search As A Service • • full stack: crawling, indexing, retrieving, tag deployment Python shop: • • ansible • sentry • django • • pelican django-‐rest-‐framework In beta testing: love more feedback!
- 4. APIs: What & Why
- 5. What is an API? Application Programming Interface ! An API is the interface implemented by an application which allows other applications to communicate with it.
- 6. What is an API? communicate
- 7. What is REST? • REpresentational State Transfer • logical resources manipulated with HTTP verbs • modern best practice • wide adoption • contrast with SOAP
- 8. Why build an API? • explosion of devices connected to the internet • can be a company’s greatest asset • bizdev 2.0: internal developers, consultants, partners, customers
- 10. Source: Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends 2013
- 11. APIs: How
- 12. Top 3 qualities • Intuitive • • no surprises, easy to learn Documented • • • simple answers to simple questions references, tutorials & quick starts Opinionated • camelCase, ids, responses, pagination, etc.
- 15. Resources • Nouns, not verbs • Coarse grained, not fine grained • example: let’s build a document datastore!
- 16. Smells like RPC • /getDocument • /getAllDocuments • /createDocument • /updateDocument • /deleteDocument
- 17. Smells like RPC • /getDocument • /getAllDocuments • /createDocument • /updateDocument • /deleteDocument This is a bad example. ! Don’t do this!
- 18. Embrace HTTP • GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE ! • Explorable with simple tools
- 19. Embrace HTTP GET /document GET /document/19 POST /document Retrieve all documents Retrieve a specific document #19 Create a new document PUT /document/19 Update an existing document #19 DELETE /document/19 Delete an existing document #19
- 21. Status Codes 2xx OK, created, all good, carry on 4xx User error: bad API key, malformed data, item not found, etc. 5xx Server error
- 22. Errors • Errors • as descriptive as possible • developers are your customers • never naked 4xx/5xx HTTP errors
- 23. Errors <xml version="1.0"?> <Error> <Message>A server error has occurred</Message> <Description>Unknown Error</Description> <Id>1234</Id> </Error> Just no.
- 24. Errors { "code" : 1234, "message" : "Unsupported media type ‘text/html’ in request", "description" : "Requests need to have the Content-‐Type HTTP header set to ‘application/json’" }
- 27. Best practices security https all the way base URLs api.companyname.com serialization json timestamps ISO 8601 & UTC versioning /v1/ caching ETag & Last-Modified gzip always & pretty print responses logging if possible
- 28. Recap • https + gzip + json • draw bipartite graph of nouns and verbs • great documentation • no surprises
- 30. Why use a framework?
- 31. Myths • roll your own • use a ‘lightweight’ framework • too tied to django • too slow
- 32. Features • pagination • permission • authentication • serialization • throttling • data validation • proper HTTP response handling
- 34. Four step formula 1. create the model 2. write the serializer 3. write the view 4. configure the urls
- 35. References • How to Design a Good API and Why it Matters: • • Best Practices for Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API • • http://www.vinaysahni.com/best-practices-for-a-pragmaticrestful-api REST worst practices: • • http://lcsd05.cs.tamu.edu/slides/keynote.pdf http://jacobian.org/writing/rest-worst-practices/ http://django-rest-framework.org/
- 36. Keep in touch! Ganesh Swami! www.silota.com [email protected] @gane5h