Now that we understand the roles and responsibilities of an API designer, the API design best practices, and the API design core principles, we can cover one more essential API design aspect called the rules of APIs. The best practices and design principles are guidelines that API designers try to incorporate in their API design. However, the rules of API need to be amended in the API design to make our APIs RESTful. So, this section is dedicated to RESTful API rules such as the following:
- Use of Uniform Resource Identifiers
- URI authority
- Resource modelling
- Resource archetypes
- URI path
- URI query
- Metadata design rules (HTTP headers and returning error codes) and representations
- Client concerns (versioning, security, and hypermedia processing)
We're confident that having a clear understanding of these rules will move us closer to design and begin...
