Tag: REST

Statelessness in RESTful applications poses challenges and opportunities, influencing how we manage fundamental security aspects such as authentication and authorization. This blog aims to delve into this topic, explore its impact, and offer insights into the best practices for handling stateless REST applications.

Understanding Statelessness in REST

REST, or REpresentational State Transfer, is an architectural style that defines a set of constraints for creating web services. One of its core principles is statelessness, which means that each request from a client to a server must contain all the information needed to understand and process the request. This model stands in contrast to stateful approaches, where the server stores user session data between requests.

In this tutorial, we will create a simple RESTful web service using Spring Boot and Gradle. Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring-based applications, and Gradle is a powerful build tool that simplifies the build process.

What Is REST?

REST, Representational State Transfer, is a set of architectural principles ensuring your APIs are interoperable, scalable, and maintainable. Imagine building Lego blocks — different applications can seamlessly interact with your API as long as they follow the RESTful guidelines, just like Legos click together regardless of their set.

In the dynamic landscape of web development, the choice of an API technology plays a pivotal role in determining the success and efficiency of a project. In this article, we embark on a comprehensive exploration of three prominent contenders: REST, gRPC, and GraphQL. Each of these technologies brings its own set of strengths and capabilities to the table, catering to different use cases and development scenarios.

What Is REST?

REST API, or Representational State Transfer Application Programming Interface, is a set of architectural principles and conventions for building web services. It provides a standardized way for different software applications to communicate with each other over the Internet. REST is often used in the context of web development to create scalable and maintainable APIs that can be easily consumed by a variety of clients, such as web browsers or mobile applications.

With the clear dominance of microservices architecture, communication between different components of a system is a critical aspect of today’s software paradigm. Two popular methods of achieving this communication are through REST (direct communication), and message brokers (indirect communication). Each approach has its own set of advantages and trade-offs, making it essential for developers to understand the differences between them in order to make informed decisions when designing and building their systems.

Although the two feel like serving completely different use cases and do not intertwine, in many cases and architectures, they are. In this article, we’ll delve into the disparities between REST and message brokers in terms of way of communication, helping you make the right choice for your specific use case.

APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are the backbone of modern web development, enabling communication and data exchange between different software systems. Commonly used types of APIs are REST (Representational State Transfer), SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), and, more recently, GraphQL and AsyncAPI. In this blog, we will dive into the differences between REST and SOAP APIs, exploring their functionality, security, performance, and ease of use. 

What Is SOAP?

SOAP was introduced in 1998 by Dave Winer, Don Box, Bob Atkinson, and Mohsen Al-Ghosein as an alternative to the more complex distributed object technologies such as CORBA and DCOM.

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A microservices architecture is an established pattern for building a complex system that consists of loosely coupled modules. It is one of the most talked-about software architecture trends in the last few years. It seems to be a surprisingly simple idea to break a large, interdependent system into many small, lightweight modules that can make software management easier. 

Since I started working for Apache APISIX, I have tried to deepen my understanding of REST via various means. Did you read my review of the "API Design Patterns" book?

In the current literature, REST is generally promoted as the best thing since sliced bread. Yet, it comes with lots of challenges. In 2010(!), Martin Fowler wrote a post on the glory of REST. He lists three steps for an API to become truly REST:

OAuth is often employed in processes requiring permissions to be granted to front-end applications and end users. Yet what we typically need in API systems integrations is a way to secure connections between the integration middleware and backend systems without a need for any ongoing human interactions.

OAuth can be a good choice for that scenario. This article shows how it can be achieved in Python with backend systems using REST and HL7 FHIR.