Design Strategy, Guidelines, and Best Practices

In the today's digitalized world, the challenges are about interconnecting various heterogeneous devices with abundant software services available across the internet and intranets. The application programmable interface (API) is one of the most promising software paradigms to address anything, anytime, anywhere, and any device, which is the one substantial need of the digital world at the moment. This chapter discusses how APIs and API designs help to address those challenges and bridge the gaps.

This chapter discusses a few essential API design guidelines, such as consistency, standardization, reusability, and accessibility through REST interfaces, which could equip API designers with better thought processes for their API modeling.

The following are this chapter's objectives:

• Learning about REST API and its importance
• Goals of RESTful API design
• API designer roles and responsibilities
• API design principles
• RESTful API design rules

Also, this chapter intends to introduce a few traits and constituents of better REST API implementations along with a few common, but avoidable, mistakes of API strategies.