System Design — How to write REST API Specification

As technology continues to advance, Representational State Transfer (REST) has emerged as a widely adopted architectural style for designing web APIs due to its simplicity, flexibility, and scalability. This blog post explores the fundamental principles of REST API design, focusing on its benefits and providing examples of its implementation in the context of e-commerce platforms

To create an effective REST API, developers should adhere to specific design principles that govern its architecture. These principles ensure consistency, flexibility, and efficiency in communication between clients and servers

Stateless Communication

One of the key principles of REST is statelessness, meaning that each API request from a client to the server must contain all the information required to understand and process the request. In other words, the server should not store any client-specific data between requests. This approach simplifies server design, improves scalability, and enhances fault tolerance. In an e-commerce platform, a stateless API ensures that clients can make requests without being tied to a specific server instance, allowing for horizontal scaling as the application grows

Resource-Based URLs

REST APIs expose resources as URLs, making them the fundamental building blocks of the API. A resource is any piece of data that can be accessed and manipulated through the API. In an e-commerce platform, examples of resources…