Best of REST API — 2025

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   Article

   System Design Newsletter·31w

   7 Best Practices for API Design 🔥

   Seven essential practices for designing robust APIs: REST fundamentals for organizing data resources, proper error handling with clear status codes, API versioning for backward compatibility, rate limiting to prevent abuse, pagination techniques (offset vs cursor) for large datasets, idempotency to avoid duplicate processing, and filtering/sorting for efficient data retrieval. Each practice includes implementation details and trade-offs to consider.

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   Article

   freeCodeCamp·1y

   Learn API Fundamentals and Architecture – A Beginner-Friendly Guide

   APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are essential tools that enable communication between different software systems. This guide covers the fundamentals of APIs, including their types (Open, Partner, Internal, Composite) and various architectures (REST, SOAP, GraphQL, gRPC). APIs streamline development by facilitating data exchange and integrating external functionalities securely and efficiently. Understanding these concepts helps developers choose the right API architecture based on performance, scalability, ease of use, and security needs.

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   Article

   LogRocket·26w

   Stop Writing REST APIs From Scratch in 2025

   Modern frameworks like tRPC, Fastify, and Hono eliminate the need to write REST APIs from scratch by leveraging schema-driven design. These tools reduce boilerplate code while improving development speed and type safety, making manual API construction increasingly obsolete.

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   Article

   ByteByteGo·49w

   EP161: A Cheatsheet on REST API Design Best Practices

   REST API design involves best practices such as using resource-oriented paths, applying HTTP verbs properly, maintaining API versioning, and utilizing standard error codes. Ensuring APIs are idempotent and supporting pagination can enhance performance and reliability. Security measures like using API Keys, JWTs, OAuth2, and HTTPS are crucial for protecting APIs in production.

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   Article

   Collections·1y

   Comprehensive Guide on REST API Best Practices for 2024

   Building secure and reliable APIs is key for modern web development. This guide provides best practices for designing RESTful APIs including resource-based architecture, stateless communication, proper URI and HTTP method usage, robust security measures, efficient data transfer, batch operations, versioning, clear documentation, and thorough testing.

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   Article

   LogRocket·49w

   gRPC vs REST: Choosing the best API design approach

   The post compares gRPC and REST, two prominent API design approaches, highlighting their differences in protocol, performance, and use cases. REST uses HTTP/1.1 and text-based formats such as JSON, making it suitable for public APIs and browser applications. gRPC leverages HTTP/2 and Protocol Buffers for efficient communication, ideal for microservices and performance-sensitive environments. Key factors such as serialization, latency, and payload size are discussed, helping developers choose the right approach for their projects.

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   Article

   System Design Codex·43w

   Essential Roadmap to Learn API Development

   A comprehensive guide covering the essential topics for learning API development, from understanding basic concepts like REST and HTTP methods to advanced topics including authentication mechanisms (OAuth 2.0, JWT), API design principles, testing strategies, and deployment considerations. The roadmap includes practical tools like Postman and OpenAPI, security best practices, and hands-on experience with public APIs from services like Google Maps and Stripe.

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   Article

   The Polymathic Engineer·42w

   APIs Versioning

   API versioning is essential for managing changes without breaking existing client applications. The guide covers two main strategies: additive changes (backward-compatible modifications) and explicit versioning (maintaining multiple API versions simultaneously). Implementation methods include URL path versioning, custom headers, and query parameters, with URL path being most common. Semantic versioning (Major.Minor.Patch) provides clear communication about change types. Proper lifecycle management involves setting deprecation timelines and using tools like OpenAPI specification and API gateways to automate version management and detect breaking changes.

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   Article

   Testim.io·1y

   Unit Test a REST API? Everything You Need to Know

   Learn the importance of proper testing in building high-quality REST APIs and discover the three key types of automated tests you should have in your test suite: unit tests, integration tests, and UI tests. Understand the role of each test type and how to implement them effectively to ensure your application remains stable and bug-free through continuous changes and refactoring.

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    Article

    System Design Codex·49w

    Key API Design Considerations

    A well-designed API is crucial for predictability, consistency, and scalability. Key considerations include defining clear interfaces, choosing the appropriate API paradigm (REST, GraphQL, or gRPC), modeling relationships effectively, implementing versioning strategies, and using rate limiting to manage requests. Treating APIs as products enhances their usability and maintainability.

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    Article

    The Miners·1y

    REST, RESTful APIs, and API documentation A dive-in on the most used architectural style to communicate between modern web applications!

    REST (Representational State Transfer) is an architectural style used for designing network-based applications, particularly web APIs. It provides a set of constraints that improve the scalability, performance, and manageability of software systems. RESTful APIs use standard HTTP methods for CRUD operations and ensure stateless communication, promoting separation of concerns. Key constraints include client-server architecture, uniform interface, statelessness, cacheability, layered system, and optional code-on-demand. Clear and consistent documentation is crucial, and tools like OpenApi and Swagger can help in documenting APIs effectively.

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    Article

    Planet Python·1y

    Modern REST API Tutorial in Python

    Learn how to create reliable and maintainable production REST APIs in Python with this practical tutorial. The guide emphasizes building interfaces that are easy to use and ensuring long-term system maintainability.

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    Article

    Product Hunt·51w

    RapidMCP - Convert your REST API into an MCP Server in minutes!

    RapidMCP allows the conversion of REST API specifications into MCP servers in minutes without any coding. It aims to streamline the process of making APIs MCP-ready, including considerations for OpenAPI Swagger spec and authentication.

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    Article

    ByteByteGo·38w

    EP172: Top 5 common ways to improve API performance

    Covers five key techniques for improving API performance: result pagination for large datasets, asynchronous logging to reduce I/O overhead, data caching with solutions like Redis, payload compression using gzip, and connection pooling for database efficiency. Also compares REST vs GraphQL architectures, explains the differences between JWT tokens and API keys for authentication, outlines AWS tech stack components across nine layers, and describes five database index data structures that optimize query performance.

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    Video

    Community Picks·1y

    gRPC vs REST vs GraphQL: Comparison & Performance

    Comparing REST API, GraphQL, and gRPC, the post explores their deployment on a Kubernetes cluster, measuring latency, CPU, memory, and network usage. It highlights the strengths and weaknesses of each, showing gRPC excelled under high load with the lowest resource usage, while REST API performed reliably with lower latency under moderate load. GraphQL struggled at higher requests per second due to its query engine overhead.

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    Video

    YouTube·31w

    How to Design APIs Like a Senior Engineer (REST, GraphQL, Auth, Security)

    A comprehensive guide covering advanced API design principles that distinguish senior engineers from junior developers. Explores REST, GraphQL, and gRPC architectures, application protocols (HTTP, WebSockets, AMQP), transport layer protocols (TCP/UDP), and authentication methods including OAuth2 and JWT tokens. Covers practical aspects like resource modeling, status codes, error handling, filtering, pagination, and security best practices for building scalable, maintainable APIs.

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    Article

    AppSignal·1y

    Fuzz Testing REST APIs in Node.js

    Fuzz testing helps ensure your code can handle unexpected inputs by generating many valid and invalid data combinations to test REST APIs. Using tools like Fuzzmatic, you can create a comprehensive suite of tests to identify and fix potential issues early. This approach can be automated and integrated into CI/CD pipelines, providing robust protection and increasing confidence in your code before it reaches production.

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    Article

    freeCodeCamp·51w

    Learn REST API Principles by Building an Express App

    Learn the core principles of REST architecture by building a simple Express app. The guide covers setting up an Express server, defining RESTful routes for CRUD operations, using middleware for input validation, and best practices to avoid when designing APIs. By the end, you will understand how to make APIs that are scalable, predictable, and easy to work with.

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    Article

    Supabase·18w

    Introducing iceberg-js: A JavaScript Client for Apache Iceberg

    Supabase released iceberg-js, an open-source JavaScript/TypeScript client for Apache Iceberg REST Catalog API. The library provides type-safe catalog management for namespaces and tables, works across all JavaScript environments, and is intentionally minimal—it handles only catalog operations, not data reads/writes or query execution. Built to power Supabase's Analytics Buckets feature, it's vendor-agnostic, uses native fetch API, and supports multiple authentication methods. The MIT-licensed library is available on GitHub and npm.

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    Article

    freeCodeCamp·31w

    How to Extend CRUD Operations to Align with Business Workflows

    CRUD operations work well for simple applications but become problematic at scale when business workflows require domain-specific actions. Instead of generic create, read, update, delete operations, APIs should model actual business processes like submit, approve, reject, and withdraw. This approach improves authorization, auditability, and workflow enforcement while making the system's intent clearer and reducing security risks.

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    Article

    freeCodeCamp·1y

    How to Work with OpenAPI in Go

    OpenAPI is a key standard for defining well-structured APIs in a language-agnostic manner. This guide explains how to architect, implement, and consume APIs using OpenAPI with Go. Covering everything from API design, schema components, and endpoint definitions, to generating server code and API documentation, this guide offers practical examples and tools for effective API management.

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    Article

    Hacker News·41w

    zserge/pennybase: Poor man's Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS), similar to Firebase/Supabase/Pocketbase

    Pennybase is a minimalist Backend-as-a-Service implementation in under 1000 lines of Go code with zero external dependencies. It provides file-based CSV storage, REST API endpoints, authentication with session cookies, role-based access control, real-time updates via Server-Sent Events, and template rendering. Data is stored in human-readable CSV files with append-only versioning, making it suitable for simple applications that need basic backend functionality without the complexity of larger solutions like Firebase or Supabase.

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    Article

    Baeldung·48w

    Introduction to RESTHeart

    RESTHeart is a Java-based framework designed to build HTTP APIs on top of MongoDB, automatically exposing collections as REST and GraphQL endpoints. It offers CRUD operations, role-based access, and authentication out of the box with minimal setup, providing a zero-code solution. This tutorial guides on running RESTHeart locally or via Docker, setting up authentication, and performing CRUD operations both through REST and GraphQL APIs.

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    Collections·19w

    Introduction of the HTTP QUERY Method

    The IETF has proposed a new HTTP QUERY method that enables safe, idempotent requests with request bodies. Unlike GET, which is limited by URI length, or POST, which isn't inherently safe or idempotent, QUERY allows complex queries in the request body while maintaining cacheability and predictable behavior. It supports capability discovery through the Accept-Query header and uses Content-Location and Location headers to provide URIs for query results, bridging the gap between GET's restrictions and POST's flexibility.

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    ByteByteGo·21w

    EP189: How to Design Good APIs

    Covers fundamental principles of API design including idempotency, versioning, resource naming, security, and pagination. Explores big data pipeline architectures across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Provides a structured learning path for AWS services from fundamentals through certifications. Explains RAG application architecture on AWS and compares virtualization approaches from bare metal to containers on VMs.

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