API Design Best Practices

1. What does REST stand for?

• Representational State Transfer

1. REST APIs are designed around a __.

• resource

1. What is an identifer of a resource? Give an example.

• an identifer is a URI that uniquely identifies that resource, for example, https://we-sell-things.com/orders

1. What are the most common HTTP verbs?

• the most common operations are GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE

1. What should the URIs be based on?

• URIs should be based on nouns (the resource) and not verbs (the operations on the resource)

1. Give an example of a good URI.

• Good: https://we-sell-things.com/orders
• Bad: https://we-sell-things.com/create-orders

1. What does it mean to have a ‘chatty’ web API? Is this a good or a bad thing?

• a chatty web API means it requires a client application to send multiple requests to find all of the data that it requires
• this is a bad thing and should avoid it

1. What status code does a successful GET request return?

• HTTP status code 200

1. What status code does an unsuccessful GET request return?

• 404

1. What status code does a successful POST request return?

• 201

1. What status code does a successful DELETE request return?

• 204

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