Considerations for setting up the App's restful API
Guide to Building a RESTful API for Your Mobile App
Guide to Building a RESTful API for Your Mobile App
API or Application Program Interface is a form of a technical environment which permits the access to another platform. Often a company has their in-house or internal API which is to be used for operating their Apps. Although the majority of the Apps today depend on internet connectivity for their operations, there are others who rely more on their other forms of backend support like web services or APIs. Talking specifically about APIs, they are either provided by third parties like Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc or are internally developed (as mentioned above) by mobile application developers.
However, the matter of concern is that not every API has a spine support which has been exclusively made for that app, which results in the development of issues later on. On the other hand Apps with exclusive API, enjoy the benefit of reduced stress, reduced efforts and reduced time, in the later stages. Therefore, we have listed down few guidelines which will aid in the development of appreciable APIs, web services and database for mobile apps. This article is significantly useful for those on the hunt for RESTful API tutorial.
Essentials of hosting, architecture, security and other considerations for creating Representational State Transfer (REST)ful API
HOSTING
Hosting options can range from having one’s own bare-metal server or going for cloud hosting option. Depending on the scalability, performance and administrative feature need of different mobile apps, decision regarding the choice of host server is made. One must thus consider the below-mentioned questions before drawing the final conclusion.
• Are the resources scaled horizontally or vertically? I.e. does the service scale the resources by adding more machines or by upgrading hardware resources for current machinery?
• Is the cost directly proportional to the usage?
• What is the range of migration features available?
• Are there anytime and energy saving features which will ease the need for recreation?
• What steps are required to ensure the security of the system?
• Is there ease of portability to any other platform or service?
DATA SECURITY
DATA SECURITY
As mentioned earlier one’s choice of host server should provide the benefit of ease of HTTPS integration and reliable CA certification. Depending on your app features, you can easily choose from varied social login or mobile login authentication which has already been used by many other counterparts of yours. Since the safety of sensitive data is essential, encryption has become a norm for security.
DEVELOPMENT, STAGING, AND PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT
Development environment architecture is needed by mobile app developers to execute the frequent developmental changes. In this environment data generated by mobile app Development Company through automated scripts populate a database which when gets approved by QA, moves into the staging environment and thereafter in the production environment. In staging environment, the import of real data justifies the system performance in production. Moreover, the use of quasi-representative data reduces the issues and bugs much before the problem takes a big form.
DATABASE AND STORAGE RELATED DECISIONS
Your efforts of using the best of the database are futile if your UUIDs are not sequential. Moreover one must consider the following pointers to conclude as to which database is to be used:
MySQL/MariaDB
• Its stable, reliable and well established
• Ensure multiple tools, framework, and libraries to benefit from
• Minimal data mismatch bugs
• Doman specific knowledge is much needed
MongoDB
• No tables or formal schema and non-relational
• Easier to scale
• Easy to ramp up
PostgreSQL
• Very popular
• Equipped with multiple features and tools for DB admin
• Ensure flexibility of mixing relational data with model-independent data
Cloud document storage
• Make use of Amazon S3 bucket to store entire data
HUNT FOR RIGHT TOOL
Be it a Pivotal Tracker tool or Trello tool or any other such tool, the key is to make use of a development tracker tool to which everyone involved in the process has to access. This ensures transparency in and record of the work in progress. Also, issues causing delays can easily be dealt as and when required.
The tool should ensure that the RESTful API endpoints are easy to test and cover both obvious use cases and expected edge cases for every endpoint. Make use of API documentation tools like Postman which can fruitfully explore and test the API apart from handling the requests, responses, error codes. Swagger, Apiary and Slate are some more documentation tools for your reference.
MULTIPLE PLATFORM SUPPORT
MULTIPLE PLATFORM SUPPORT
When building the app no one wants to undergo the hassle of rewriting complicated filtering and parsing logic every time. And so there is a need for robust sorting and filtering, which will provide the client with the needful. For this reason, it’s suggestive to leverage the most powerful hardware of the server while keeping the client logic simple for accessing and displaying the data to the user as soon as possible.
