Hands-On RESTful Web Services with TypeScript 3

Design and develop scalable RESTful APIs for your applications

Biharck Muniz Araújo

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789955019
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

A step-by-step guide that will help you design, develop, scale, and deploy RESTful APIs with TypeScript 3 and Node.js

Key Features

• Gain in-depth knowledge of OpenAPI and Swagger to build scalable web services
• Explore a variety of test frameworks and test runners such as Stryker, Mocha, and Chai
• Create a pipeline by Dockerizing your environment using Travis CI, Google Cloud Platform, and GitHub

Book Description

In the world of web development, leveraging data is the key to developing comprehensive applications, and RESTful APIs help you to achieve this systematically. This book will guide you in designing and developing web services with the power of TypeScript 3 and Node.js. You'll design REST APIs using best practices for request handling, validation, authentication, and authorization. You'll also understand how to enhance the capabilities of your APIs with ODMs, databases, models and views, as well as asynchronous callbacks. This book will guide you in securing your environment by testing your services and initiating test automation with different testing approaches. Furthermore, you'll get to grips with developing secure, testable, and more efficient code, and be able to scale and deploy TypeScript 3 and Node.js-powered RESTful APIs on cloud platforms such as the Google Cloud Platform. Finally, the book will help you explore microservices and give you an overview of what GraphQL can allow you to do.

By the end of this book, you will be able to use RESTful web services to create your APIs for mobile and web apps and other platforms.

What you will learn

• Explore various methods to plan your services in a scalable way
• Understand how to handle different request types and the response status code
• Get to grips with securing web services
• Delve into error handling and logging your web services for improved debugging
• Uncover the microservices architecture and GraphQL
• Create automated CI/CD pipelines for release and deployment strategies

Who this book is for

If you're a developer who has a basic understanding of REST concepts and want to learn how to design and develop RESTful APIs, this book is for you. Prior knowledge of TypeScript will help you make the most out of this book.

Section 1: Unraveling API Design

In this section, you will gain an understanding of the inner workings of API design. You will also learn best practices for creating APIs and how to plan your APIs for future needs.

The following chapters are included in this section:

• Chapter 1, Introduction to RESTful Web Service Development
• Chapter 2, Principles of Designing RESTful APIs
• Chapter 3, Designing RESTful APIs with OpenAPI and Swagger

Introduction to RESTful API Development

In order to get the best from any technology, it is necessary to understand deeply what the technology does. Throughout this chapter, RESTful concepts will be explained in detail with necessary elements to help you to develop and run RESTful services. The main objective of the chapter is to show you comprehensive examples that transpose these concepts to real-world scenarios and help you to understand their definitions in an easier way.

Currently, there is a huge necessity for applications to scale when necessary; they need to be fast, secure, portable, and trustable. These applications no longer serve one specific purpose; in fact, they work to solve corporative issues and meet the needs of end users.

APIs are the core elements for creating web and mobile applications. They provide structured data for your applications. This chapter mainly focuses on the definition of Representational State Transfer (REST) and RESTful principles, and describes the primary logic behind these architectural principles as well as the standards to follow while creating a web service.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• The REST definition
• RESTful styles
• The general concepts regarding REST
• HTTP methods and verbs

Technical requirements

There are no requirements for this chapter; this chapter will lay the foundation for what this book is going to cover.

What is REST?

RESTful web services are services built according to REST principles. The idea is to have them designed to essentially work well on the web. Alright, but what is REST? Let's start from the beginning, that is, by defining REST.

The REST style is a set of software engineering practices that contains constraints that should be used in order to create web services in distributed hypermedia systems. REST is not a tool and neither is it a language; in fact, REST is agnostic of protocols, components, and languages.

It is important to say that REST is an architectural style and not a toolkit. REST provides a set of design rules in order to create stateless services that are shown as resources and, in some cases, sources of specific information such as data and functionality. The identification of each resource is performed by its unique Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). REST describes simple interfaces that transmit data over a standardized interface such as HTTP and HTTPS without any additional messaging layer, such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP).

The consumer will access REST resources via a URI using HTTP methods (this will be explained in more detail later). After the request, it is expected that a representation of the requested resource is returned. The representation of any resource is, in general, a document that reflects the current or intended state of the requested resource.

REST architectural styles

The REST architectural style describes six constraints. These constraints were originally described by Roy Fielding in his Ph.D. thesis ( https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm). They include the following:

• Uniform interface
• Stateless
• Cacheable
• Client-server architectu...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright and Credits
• Dedication
• About Packt
• Foreword
• Contributors
• Preface
• Section 1: Unraveling API Design
• Introduction to RESTful API Development
• Principles of Designing RESTful APIs
• Designing RESTful APIs with OpenAPI and Swagger
• Section 2: Developing RESTful Web Services
• Setting Up Your Development Environment
• Building Your First API
• Handling Requests and Responses
• Formatting the API - Output
• Section 3: Enhancing RESTful Web Services
• Working with Databases and ODMs
• Securing Your API
• Error Handling and Logging
• Creating a CI/CD Pipeline for Your API
• Section 4: Extending the Capabilities of RESTful Web Services
• Developing RESTful APIs with Microservices
• Flexible APIs with GraphQL
• Assessments
• Other Books You May Enjoy