What every developer should know about REST
summary
Overview of REST from a front-end angle with concrete rules: use clean URIs and correct methods (GET/PUT/POST/DELETE), return proper HTTP status codes (200, 304, 404, 403, 451), and prefer explicit content negotiation like application/json. Secure APIs with TLS and simple patterns (basic auth over HTTPS, token exchange, or OAuth2). Optimize with aggressive cache-control max-age and conditional caching, rev URLs (GUIDs) for immutable resources, and CDNs (Cloudflare) — a Player FM style implementation uses versioned resource URLs and works in production to reduce server load and improve perceived performance.
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chapters (37)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:17About Michael
- 3:06The Internet of Things
- 5:03Three Principles
- 6:44Developer Experience
- 8:13API Design
- 8:46URI
- 9:19URI Example
- 10:48URL Representation
- 11:08Browser Representation
- 11:56Network Representation
- 13:17Response
- 16:28HTTP Status Katz
- 16:54HTTP 403
- 17:27Four51
- 18:42Self documenting responses
- 20:30Content types
- 22:05Cheating notation
- 22:56Whats next
- 23:22What is REST
- 23:52CRUD actions
- 24:57Security
- 26:17SSL
- 28:12HTTP Basic auth
- 30:02Request signing
- 30:40Session cookies
- 31:19OAuth
- 32:13Turbo Mode
- 33:21Scalability
- 33:36Performance vs Scalability
- 34:48Local Cache
- 35:46Defenseindepth
- 36:13Cache control
- 40:11API cache control
- 42:15Conditional caching
- 45:29Intermediaries
- 47:24Why use REST
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