Designing and building a REST API takes time, takes effort and most importantly takes the right skill. REST APIs should be easy to understand, well documented and follow standards so that integration is straightforward. This can be acheived only if we follow the best practices when designing a RESTful API. Lets look into the REST API best practices to design and build great APIs which are robust and reliable. APIs are a generic concept that can be explained in many ways for example, - An API is a web service which delivers resources via web technologies such as HTTP. - APIs are interfaces used for system to system communications. - APIs are used for building distributed software systems to enable loose coupling.

October is a free, open-source, self-hosted CMS platform based on the Laravel PHP Framework where it claims that clients don't build websites, developers do. This is true! for anything much bigger than a personal blog, the end user of a CMS is rarely a developer and most often clients hire someone to build their website. October platform is build based on this concept, and focused on being a developer-first platform with an assumption that developers have basic knowledge in HTML, CSS and PHP. It is a mix of file based and database driven CMS.

Confused whether to use PUT or PATCH or POST in your API? Don't worry you are not alone and this is a common confusion which happens to most of us or to all of us at some point while developing our API. Before we understand the difference between PUT vs PATCH vs POST, first we need to understand Idempotency.

Representational state transfer (REST) is a an architectural style designed to take advantage of existing protocols like HTTP/HTTPS. REST defines a set of constraints to be used for creating APIs. When an API is designed based on the principles which adheres to the Representational state transfer architectural style it is called a RESTful API. Unlike SOAP services, RESTful APIs are not constrained to one particular data type like XML. Instead, RESTful APIs can return any type of data format like JSON, YAML, XML, TEXT etc depending on the client request. Also the datatype is independent of the methods and resources.

Understanding the URI Parameter and Query Parameter How many times have you wondered whether to use query parameter or URI parameter when designing an API. Lets understand the difference. As an API developer, you would have designed an API to get a collection of resource, filter the resource or do some action on an instance resource. It is important to understand when to use a query parameter and uri parameter. They both serve different purpose.