Summary – REST APIs
REST APIs facilitate communication between applications in today’s interconnected digital world. We explored the HTTP protocol, HTTP methods, HTTP status codes, and HTTP headers. We then explored API versioning, the Data Transfer Objects (DTOs), and the importance of API contracts. Here are a few Key Takeaways:
- REST & HTTP: REST APIs are integral to web application communication. They use HTTP as their transport protocol, leveraging its methods, status codes, and headers to facilitate interaction between different applications.
- HTTP Methods: HTTP methods or verbs (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, PATCH) define the type of action a client can perform on a resource in a RESTful API. Understanding these methods is crucial for carrying out CRUD operations.
- HTTP Status Codes and Headers: HTTP status codes inform clients about the success or failure of their requests. HTTP headers transmit additional information and describe clients’ options and capabilities. Both are essential components of HTTP communication.
- Versioning: Managing changes in APIs without disrupting existing clients is a significant challenge. Different strategies for API versioning can help address this issue, but each comes with its own trade-offs.
- Data Transfer Object (DTO): DTOs package data into a format that can provide many benefits, including reducing the number of HTTP calls, improving encapsulation, and enhancing performance when sending data over the network.
- API Contracts: Clear and robust API contracts ensure API stability. They serve as a blueprint for interaction between an API and its consumers, outlining available endpoints, supported HTTP methods, expected request formats, and potential response structures.
- Practical Application: Understanding these concepts is not only theoretically important but also practically helpful in building and working with REST APIs using ASP.NET Core or any other similar technology.
By now, you should have a solid understanding of REST APIs and be ready to explore how to implement one using ASP.NET Core. ASP.NET Core makes writing REST APIs using MVC or minimal APIs a breeze. MVC is a well-used pattern that is almost impossible to avoid. However, the new minimal API model makes the process leaner. Moreover, with application patterns like Request-EndPoint-Response (REPR) or Vertical Slice Architecture, we can organize our API per feature instead of by layer, leading to an improved organization. We cover those topics in Section 4: Application patterns.Next, we explore designing with ASP.NET Core, starting with Minimal APIs.