The document discusses best practices and advantages of REST APIs, highlighting their role in enabling communication between applications without user intervention. It contrasts REST APIs with web services, explaining differences in protocols, data formats, and implementation methods. The article provides best practices for developing REST APIs, including endpoint naming, permission management, API versioning, and security considerations.

1. Best Practices and Advantages of REST
APIs
In this article, I am going to share the best practices and the advantages of
REST APIs, as I am working with a team on a REST-based web application.
Newsdata.io news API is a REST-based API that fetches news data from
thousands of news websites in JSON format. Therefore, I have a basic
understanding of REST APIs that I am going to share with you.
What is an API?
API is an abbreviation for Application Programming Interface. It is a
software interface that allows two applications to communicate with one
another without the need for user intervention.

2. APIs enable a product or service to communicate with other products and
services without requiring knowledge of how they are implemented.
It facilitates communication between the provider and the client. It is a type
of software interface that provides a service to other programs. An API
specification is a document or standard that describes how to build or use
such a connection or interface.
An API is said to be implemented or exposed by a computer system that
meets this standard. API can refer to either the specification or the
implementation.
What is a Web Service?
A Web service is a set of open protocols and standards for exchanging data
between systems or applications.
Software applications are written in a variety of programming languages
and run on a variety of platforms. It enables the use of web services to
exchange data across computer networks.
• A web service is a collection of open-source protocols and standards that
are used to exchange data between systems or applications, whereas an
API is a software interface that allows two applications to interact with
each other without the need for user intervention.
• Web services are used for REST, SOAP, and XML-RPC communication,
whereas APIs are used for any communication style.

3. • The HTTP protocol is supported by web services only, whereas the
HTTP/HTTPS protocol is supported by APIs.
• The web service supports XML, whereas the API supports both XML and
JSON.
• Web services are all APIs, but not all APIs are web services.
Types of Web Services
Web services should be deployed in a variety of ways. SOAP and RESTful
web services are the two most common types of web services.
SOAP — SOAP is a protocol that existed prior to the introduction of REST.
The main motivation for developing SOAP was to ensure that programs
written in various platforms and programming languages could securely
exchange data.
REST — This was created specifically for working with media components,
files, or even objects on a specific hardware device. A RESTful web service is
any web service that adheres to the REST principles. For working with the
required components, REST employs the standard HTTP verbs GET, POST,
PUT, and DELETE.
REST aims to improve performance, scalability, simplicity, modifiability,
visibility, portability, and reliability. This is accomplished by adhering to
REST principles such as client-server architecture, statelessness,
cacheability, the use of a layered system, code-on-demand support, and the
use of a uniform interface.

4. Advantages of REST-based APIs
REST eliminates many of SOAP’s drawbacks, such as the requirement for
clients to understand operation semantics as a precondition for using it, or
the use of different ports for different types of notifications. Furthermore,
REST can handle a large number of resources, whereas SOAP requires a
large number of operations to accomplish this.
REST has the following advantages:
• It is usually simple to construct and modify.
• Low resource utilization.
• Process instances are explicitly created.
• The client does not need routing information with the initial URI.
• For notifications, clients can use a generic ‘listener’ interface.
Best Practices for Rest API
While developing and testing Rest API, I will highlight best practices for
both developers and testers.
API Endpoint Naming
The names of the endpoints should be referred to as nouns, and their
actions should be referred to as methods.

5. If you use verbs with nouns like ‘CreateUser,’ ‘DeleteUser,’ and ‘GetUser,’
you will generate a large number of endpoints.
Assuming you have the ‘/users’ endpoint, you should specify it as follows:
• To create a user — /users with post action
• To fetch user details — /users with GET action
It will also aid in the reduction of documentation maintenance for API
endpoints.
Exposing Minimum Permissions and Using Correct Methods
Always grant the bare minimum of permissions to an endpoint. For
example, if an API endpoint is only used to receive or fetch information, do
not add any additional API level PUT or POST methods to plan for the
future.
Using Proper Versioning in API
1. Standard HTTP status codes
REST API, as we know, is built on top of the HTTP protocol. It is always
preferable to use a unified standard response status so that all team
members are on the same page.
2. Validation on the API level

6. Endpoints should always be validated using both positive and negative
scenarios.
If you’ve created an endpoint, always try to reach it by changing the method
and name of its action. Send requests with no mandatory fields in the body.
3. Proper response messages and error handling
It all boils down to providing users with the correct HTTP status code. If the
error occurs on the client-side, it should always fall into the 4xx class. If an
error occurs on the server, it should always be in the 5xx class.
If you send a request URL that does not exist on the server, it should always
return a 404 with a proper log message. If you call an endpoint with an
invalid action type, it should always return a 405 with the correct message
in the response body and not expose the stack trace.
4. Considering security aspects
To protect the server from DDoS attacks, it is always beneficial to limit the
number of requests from a single host. Use a secure authorization and
authentication mechanism, as well as the HTTPS protocol, at all times. If
you’re going to use a JWT token in your project, make sure it doesn’t
contain any sensitive client data.
5. Documentation

7. Having API documentation for your project is extremely beneficial. To be an
effective engineer, you must ensure that everything is properly documented.
Swagger and Slate are commonly used for API documentation as best
practices.
References:
1. https://newsdata.io/
2. https://medium.com/chegg/best-practices-for-rest-api-df7417ea07e5
3. https://www.guru99.com/api-vs-web-service-difference.html