Hands-On RESTful API Design Patterns and Best Practices

HTTP headers

As you might already know, HTTP specifications have a set of standard headers, through which a client can get information about a requested resource, and carry the messages that indicate its representations and may serve as directives to control intermediary caches.

The following points suggest a few sets of rules conforming to the HTTP standard headers:

• Should use content-type: Client and servers rely on this header to indicate how to process the message's body, as the value of the content-type specifies the form of the data contained in the request or response message body called media types.
• Should use content-length: The client should know the size of the message body that it is about to read. The other benefit is that the ...