Designing and Implementing REST APIs For the Long Haul
summary
Advocates designing the API before coding, choosing auth (OAuth or API keys rather than embedding usernames/passwords), and picking a clear versioning strategy (route-based /v1 is preferred). Recommends consistent status codes and rich field-level error responses (return all validation failures, include a correlation/request ID) — 400 Bad Request as the common error for client validation. Warns against leaking internal states, advises pagination/expand params for large sub-resources, and uses Azure deployment slots for near-zero downtime deployments.
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chapters (17)
- 0:00Start
- 9:13Uniform Interface Constraint
- 18:32Why?
- 23:42A few simple rules
- 25:54Step 0
- 30:00Status Codes
- 31:48Verbs
- 33:06Format
- 39:29Error Handling
- 39:49Error reporting
- 40:46General error guidelines
- 42:33Header
- 42:52Query string
- 43:16Route
- 46:01Other Considerations
- 48:20Performance
- 50:32Support guidelines
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