Principles & Best practices of REST API Design

Love Sharma
ByteByteGo System Design Alliance
5 min readNov 21, 2021

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This best-practices article intends for developers interested in creating RESTful Web services that provide high reliability and consistency across multiple service suites; following these guidelines; services are positioned for rapid, widespread, public adoption by internal and external clients.

Here is the complete diagram to easily understand REST API’s principles, methods, and best practices.

Now, Let’s begin with elaborating on each box by starting with its principles.

The Six Principles / Constraints

  1. Client-Server: Separation of concerns is the principle behind the client-server constraints. By separating the user interface concerns from the data storage concerns, we improve the portability of the user interface across multiple platforms and improve scalability by simplifying the server components.
  2. Stateless: communication must be stateless, as in the client-stateless-server (CSS) style. Each request from the client to the server must contain all of the information necessary to understand the request. Session state is therefore kept entirely on the client.
  3. Cacheable: To improve network efficiency, we add cache constraints to form the client-cache-stateless-server style. Cache constraints require that the data…

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Love Sharma
ByteByteGo System Design Alliance

Love is an experience cloud engineer with a demonstrated history of building large scale enterprise application.