RESTful Web API Design with Node.j

RESTful Web APIs allow developers to create unprecedented applications by leveraging the data on the Internet. Since JavaScript is the language of the web, building APIs using Node.js provides a seamless development experience on both the front end and the back end.

This video course gives you an overview of a RESTful API and goes through the logical steps of building one. It explores three different APIs, focusing on their similarities and differences to effectively implement one.

We’ll start off by defining APIs, showing how they can be built on top of HTTP, and listing the properties that make an API RESTful. We will develop Twitter Notes, a web application that lets its users leave notes for their Twitter friends. We will use Twitter’s API to implement a login flow and then design a web API. In addition to using Twitter’s API, we will take a closer look at two other real-world APIs—Facebook API and GitHub API. Finally, we’ll end up honing some best practices to keep the APIs secure, maintainable, and performant.

By the end of this course, you will have a good grasp of APIs, HTTP, REST, OAuth 1.0a, API testing, and API security. Since the course explores three different REST APIs, you will reach a level where you will be comfortable using any RESTful API, even if it does not have an SDK.

What You Will Learn

• Define what an API is and how it is used in client-server communication
• Explore HTTP requests and responses and find out about the various fields that make up these requests and responses
• Understand the architectural constraints and properties that make an API RESTful
• Use Twitter’s API to tweet and search for tweets
• Store Twitter’s data in our database to minimize the use of Twitter’s API
• Use Async.js to handle Twitter’s API constraints
• Test APIs using Postman and Apache Benchmark
• Build the API on the server using Express.js and MongoDB
• Find out about the Facebook Graph API, and its structure, resources, and permissions
• Be introduced to GitHub API, its use of different representations, the PATCH verb, HATEOAS, and conditional requests
• Get security tips to prevent session hijacking vulnerabilities

Audience

This video course is for Node.js developers who know JavaScript and are familiar with HTML and CSS. Knowledge of REST or HTTP is not essential as this course provides all the background information required to get you started.

About The Author

Saleh Hamadeh: Saleh Hamadeh started programming when he was 13, and he currently studies computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Saleh became president of gt-webdev, a student organization focused on teaching students web development. During his time at Georgia Tech, Saleh interned as a web developer at BrainJocks and Yahoo! Saleh is passionate about the future of the web and hopes to work, learn, and teach in that field.