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REST is an acronym for REpresentational State Transfer and an architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems.

The six guiding principles or Constraints of REST are:

Uniform Interface
Client-Server
Layered architecture
Code on demand (optional).

We will discuss the Stateless constraint of REST in-depth in this article.

NOTE: As per the REST{Representational “State” Transfer } architecture, the server does not store any information about the client-side on the server-side.

Each request from the client to server must contain all the information needed to process that request and that information cannot be stored at the server side for any future reference. This restriction is called Statelessness.

The client is responsible for storing and handling the session-related information on its own side. If any information is required from the previous request, the client will share it in the current request.

“ Statelessness means that every HTTP request happens in complete isolation”.

Application state is the information stored at the server side to identify incoming requests and previous interactions, REST statelessness means being free from the application state.

Advantages of REST Statelessness:

Easily Scalable: As there is no need for any stored information, any server can handle any client request. Thus, many concurrent requests can be processed by deploying API to multiple servers.
Decreased Complexity: As state synchronization is not needed, it reduces the complexity.
Improved Performance: Server doesn’t need to keep track of client requests, which increases the performance.

Disadvantages of REST Statelessness:

Increased request size: The request size becomes very big many times as it contains all the information about the request and previous transactions.

EXAMPLE of Statelessness:

Suppose we have an API where we want to log in and order some goods, the API deployed on many servers can serve many requests, even from the same account without storing the authentication details or provided token state.

Every time client is making a request it will send the authentication details as well as the other required information and that request can be processed easily at the server side as it includes all the information needed to fulfill the request.

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Restful API Stateless

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Understanding stateless, benefits of stateless restful apis, common error-prone cases and how to avoid them.

At its core, being 'stateless' means that the server does not keep any client state between requests. Each request from a client to a server must contain all the information needed to understand and process the request. The server should not store anything about the latest HTTP request the client made. The next request from the client will be treated as a completely new and independent transaction.
For example, let's say you're building a RESTful API for a simple application like a task manager. If a user requests a list of their tasks, the server will process this request, fetch the tasks, and then forget all about it. If the user then wants to delete a task, they must send a new request, complete with all the necessary information for the server to understand what it needs to do. The server does not remember the previous request or its outcome.
Scalability: Stateless applications are easier to scale because new resources can be added or removed without affecting the system's overall performance or functionality.
Reliability: If a server fails during a client's transaction, any other server can step in and handle the request because the client provides all necessary information with each request.
Simplicity: Stateless architecture simplifies the server design since there is no need to manage or store session information. It further allows each request to be processed in isolation, potentially leading to more straightforward and efficient code.
Not Including Enough Information in Requests: As we've discussed, one of the defining features of stateless APIs is that each request must include all the information needed to process that request. Forgetting to include essential information can lead to errors or unexpected behavior. Always double-check your requests to ensure all necessary information is included.
Mistaking Stateless for Data-less: While stateless means the server doesn't remember anything about the previous request, it doesn't mean the server doesn't retain any data. Servers can (and do) store data persistently across requests, like in a database. The stateless principle only applies to the transactional aspect of the interaction, not the storage of data.
Confusion Over Authentication: Stateless APIs can be confusing when it comes to authentication. Since the server doesn't maintain any session information, how does it remember who is authenticated? The answer is tokens. With each request, clients must send an authentication token proving their identity. This token is included in the HTTP header.

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All Differences Between Stateless VS Stateful API

Although sounding similar stateless and stateful APIs have very little in common. With each having niches in the web development industry, find out all their differences and what kind of conditions they excel in!

Steven Ang Cheong Seng

When web developers are designing their applications, a lot of factors have to be accounted for. APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are one of many variables that constitute a functioning app. However, there are different classifications of APIs, one of them based on how they retain information. These APIs are separated into two types: stateless and stateful APIs.

One of the most popular API architecture styles falls into one of the two categories between stateful and stateless APIs - the RESTful (Representational State Transfer) API. If you are not sure which classification of state RESTful APIs fall into, give this article a read:

What Are Stateless APIs?

Stateless APIs are APIs that treat each request from a client to a server as an independent transaction, and also where the server does not retain any information about the client's previous interaction.

Key Characteristics of Stateless APIs

Independence of Requests: Each request sent from a client to the server contains all the necessary information for the server to process it, and is not affected by any prior requests made, nor affects any requests in the future.
No Session Management: Stateless APIs do not require the server to manage client sessions or store any session-related data. As a result, there is no need for session tracking mechanisms such as cookies or server-side sessions.
Scalability: Stateless APIs are highly scalable because servers can process requests independently without the need to maintain client state. Load balancers can distribute incoming requests across multiple servers without concern for session affinity.
Simplicity: Stateless APIs are generally simpler to implement and understand compared to stateful APIs. Since each request contains all the necessary information, there is no need for complex session management or state synchronization between the client and server.
Fault Tolerance: Stateless APIs are inherently fault-tolerant because servers do not rely on maintaining client state. If a server fails, incoming requests can be routed to other servers without any impact on client interactions.

Advantages of Stateless APIs

Flexibility : Stateless APIs provide flexibility in scaling and deployment. Since servers do not maintain a client state, new server instances can be added or removed from the pool without impacting client interactions. This flexibility allows for dynamic scaling based on demand and enables efficient resource utilization in cloud environments.
Performance : Stateless APIs often offer better performance compared to stateful APIs. Since each request contains all the necessary information for processing, servers can respond quickly without the overhead of managing the session state or performing additional lookups. This results in lower latency and faster response times, especially under heavy load conditions.

Disadvantages of Stateless APIs

Difficulty in Implementing Complex Workflows : Stateless APIs may struggle to handle complex workflows or transactional processes that require maintaining state between multiple requests. Implementing features such as multi-step transactions or long-running processes may be more challenging with stateless APIs compared to stateful alternatives.
Limited Support for Real-Time Interactions : Stateless APIs are primarily designed for request-response interactions and may not be well-suited for real-time communication or collaboration scenarios. Implementing features such as real-time updates or notifications may require additional workarounds or compromises.

Examples of Popular Stateless APIs

RESTful APIs : Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style for designing networked applications. RESTful APIs are stateless by design, where each request from a client to the server contains all the necessary information for the server to process it. Examples of RESTful APIs include those provided by social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, e-commerce platforms like Amazon, and cloud services like AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Azure.
HTTP APIs : Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) APIs follow the principles of statelessness, where each HTTP request is independent and self-contained. These APIs are commonly used for communication between web clients (such as browsers or mobile apps) and web servers. Examples include public APIs provided by services like Google Maps, OpenWeatherMap, and GitHub.
GraphQL APIs : GraphQL is a query language for APIs that enables clients to request only the data they need. While GraphQL itself is agnostic to statefulness, it's often implemented in a stateless manner over HTTP. GraphQL APIs typically expose a single endpoint for executing queries, mutations, and subscriptions, with each request containing the specific data requirements. Examples of GraphQL APIs include those provided by GitHub, Shopify, and Yelp.
Microservices APIs : Microservices architecture decomposes complex applications into smaller, independently deployable services. Each microservice can expose its API, typically implemented as stateless APIs using protocols like HTTP or gRPC. Examples of microservices APIs include those used by Netflix for streaming, Uber for ride-hailing, and Spotify for music streaming.
Serverless APIs : Serverless computing platforms like AWS Lambda and Google Cloud Functions enable developers to deploy code without managing servers. Serverless APIs are often implemented as stateless functions triggered by HTTP requests or other events. These APIs are ideal for lightweight, event-driven applications and backend services. Examples include serverless APIs for processing user uploads, sending notifications, and performing data processing tasks.

What are Stateful APIs?

Stateful APIs are APIs that maintain the state or context of client interaction with servers between requests. This is the exact opposite of what stateless APIs are - stateful APIs can keep track of resources, and process subsequent requests that derive from the same client.

Key Characteristics of Stateful APIs

Session-Based Security : Stateful APIs offer robust session-based security mechanisms for authenticating and authorizing clients. By establishing sessions with clients and managing session tokens or cookies, these APIs can enforce access controls, permissions, and security policies consistently across multiple requests.
Consistency and Reliability : Stateful APIs ensure consistency and reliability by synchronizing client state between the client and server. This helps prevent data inconsistencies, race conditions, and concurrency issues that may arise in distributed systems with shared states or resources.
Efficient Resource Utilization : Stateful APIs can optimize resource utilization by reusing established sessions or connections between the client and server. This reduces the overhead of repeatedly authenticating and establishing connections for each request, resulting in improved performance and reduced network latency.
Real-Time Updates : Stateful APIs facilitate real-time communication and updates between clients and servers by maintaining continuous connections. This allows servers to push updates, notifications, or data changes to clients instantly, enabling real-time collaboration, messaging, and streaming applications.
Contextual Insights : Stateful APIs enable servers to gain contextual insights into client behavior, preferences, and usage patterns over time. By analyzing session data and client interactions, applications can derive valuable insights for personalization, optimization, and decision-making.

Advantages of Stateful APIs

Session Management : Stateful APIs allow for the establishment and management of sessions between clients and servers. This enables the server to maintain client context and state between requests, which can be beneficial for applications that require continuous interactions and personalized experiences.
Complex Business Logic : Stateful APIs are well-suited for applications with complex business logic or workflows that require maintaining context across multiple requests. The server can maintain the state of long-running transactions, workflows, or state machines, enabling more efficient processing and coordination.

Disadvantages of Stateful APIs

Concurrency Issues : Managing concurrent access to shared state can be challenging in stateful APIs. Race conditions, data inconsistencies, and concurrency issues may arise when multiple clients access or modify shared resources concurrently, requiring careful synchronization and locking mechanisms to ensure data integrity.
Difficulty in Horizontal Scaling : Stateful APIs may face challenges in horizontally scaling across multiple server instances due to the need to maintain session state. Distributing sessions across multiple servers and ensuring consistency and synchronization between them can be complex and may require additional infrastructure or middleware.

Examples of Popular Stateful APIs

WebSocket APIs : WebSocket is a communication protocol that provides full-duplex communication channels over a single TCP connection. WebSocket APIs maintain persistent connections between clients and servers, allowing for real-time bidirectional communication. They are commonly used in applications that require instant messaging, online gaming, collaborative editing, live updates, and other real-time interactions.
Remote Procedure Call (RPC) APIs : RPC APIs enable clients to invoke procedures or methods on a remote server and receive responses. While RPC itself is agnostic to statefulness, some implementations maintain client state between requests, especially in cases where sessions or connections are long-lived. RPC APIs are commonly used in distributed systems, microservices architectures, and client-server applications.
Session-based APIs : Some legacy APIs rely on session-based authentication and maintain client state using mechanisms like cookies or session tokens. These APIs require clients to authenticate and establish a session with the server, and the server maintains the session state for the duration of the session. Session-based APIs are commonly used in web applications, e-commerce platforms, and enterprise systems.
Real-time Data Streaming APIs : Real-time data streaming APIs maintain persistent connections between clients and servers to stream data in real time. These APIs are commonly used in applications that require continuous data updates, such as financial trading platforms, IoT (Internet of Things) systems, real-time analytics, and monitoring dashboards.
Collaborative Applications : Collaborative applications, such as collaborative document editing platforms, collaborative drawing tools, and collaborative project management tools, often use stateful APIs to enable real-time collaboration among multiple users. These APIs maintain a shared state between clients and servers, allowing users to see each other's changes in real-time.

Coding Differences Between Stateless VS. Stateful APIs

The coding example will involve utilizing the Python Flask web framework. Notice that there is an extra session library implemented in the stateful API coding.

Stateless APIs:

Stateful API:

Comparison:

The stateless API code example only takes the query parameter's data and performs the code's operation, followed by returning the result as JSON.
In the stateful API code example, the query parameter's data , and saves the value suing Flask's session management. The store valued can then be used in the same client session, updating it every time a request is made.

Tabulated Summary of the Comparison Between Stateless VS. Stateful APIs

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The choice between stateless and stateful APIs really depends on the specific requirements of the application and the trade-offs involved, as they are not a one-for-all solution to web development problems.

The main takeaway that you should understand is that both stateless and stateful APIs excel when certain conditions are met.

Stateless APIs are commonly used in distributed systems and microservice architectures, where data is sent and requests are independent from one another.

Stateful APIs are suitable for applications that require clients to have a constant connection with the server, such as live video streams and online collaborative applications.

Unlike stateful and stateless APIs, Apidog is an all-in-one API tool for developers who wish to create, modify, and maintain APIs. With the facilitation of all necessary functionalities and specifications for the entire API lifecycle, developers can rely on Apidog to provide them with the services required to produce the best quality APIs.

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What's the Difference Between Stateful and Stateless?

If you're learning about APIs, you may have read about stateful and stateless communications protocol. For example, one of the architectural constraints of REST APIs is that communications are stateless: a REST request between client and server contains all the information that is needed in isolation, and doesn't store previous sessions to understand the request. A stateful communication stores previous sessions with a user. The majority of applications we use day-to-day are stateful , but in the age of web applications and microservices, the distinction can become blurred as stateless applications store user cookies on the client side while still being considered stateless.

Since this article will examine the differences between stateless and stateful communications protocols, we should define what the state of an application is. State is the condition of a system at a point in time. Turning the volume up or down on your computer is relative to the current volume, so your computer must store the current volume as part of its state information. When you shut your computer off, that variable is stored on the hard drive as part of the computer's state.

A variable has state, because it can change. A value just is, so it does not have state.

Stateful Services

A stateful protocol retains previous session information as part of a user's state. This client session data (state data) allows the application to process subsequent transactions in the context of preceding ones . Using a database to store data doesn't necessarily mean an application is stateful- the important distinction is that the client's current state data is stored on the server itself.

Stateful Example

Online banking uses state to record a user's funds, linked accounts, and authorization. When a user deposits money into an account, the account's state changes and is saved on the bank's server. The user's name and password are stored on the bank's web server to be confirmed when the user logs in via their web browser. If the user changes their password, the password's state changes in the server.

Stateless Services

A stateless architecture retains no information as part of a user's state. Every interaction is independent of the server's state and depends only on the data held by the system (or in the request) at that moment. This means that every client request must contain all necessary information for the server to execute and respond to the request, including authentication keys. Where stateful protocol remembers the past, stateless protocol treats every action as if it is happening for the first time.

Stateless Example

REST is designed to be functionally stateless . Data required to complete the request is stored in key/value pairs within the request itself, travels via API to the server with the provided authentication, and the server performs the specified task, with the data contained in the request. The server returns a value and HTTP status code to the client. The next request starts the process over again, including authentication.

An example of a stateless API is the Phone Validation API . We can send this API a request for a phone number:

`curl 'https://phonevalidation.abstractapi.com/v1/?api_key={YOUR API KEY}&phone=14152007986'`

The Phone Validation API then checks the number against a database, and returns our request.

While the phone number's validity or location might change, at no point in this request did we need historical client data from the server to execute our request. We just sent a GET request with proper authentication attached through the API, with the number we are looking for, and received our information from the server.

Stateful vs Stateless

Stateful and stateless protocols both have their use cases, and it is up to the software engineer to judiciously apply them, but one serious shortcoming of stateful applications is they don't scale as well as stateless applications. Remembering one client session may not seem like much, but imagine millions of client sessions, with all their possible authentications, states, and changes, all requiring server-side storage and bandwidth. That is a significant overhead! A stateless protocol doesn't mean there is no state present, just that it is not stored on the server. Historical client data can be stored on the client side with cookies, or a GET request can retrieve client information from a database, but this application is still stateless because a client state is not stored on the server. This allows scalability and agility that stateful protocols do not, and brings us to containerization, microservices, and cloud computing.

State in the Age of Microservices

A container is an application with its runtime requirements included in the package. It is like a virtual machine, but much more lightweight, while still containing all dependencies and libraries necessary for the application's use. Containers have fundamentally changed what an application is. Microservices are an application, but broken into many pieces across different servers in the cloud. It is an application as a sum of its connections, instead of one application existing on one machine, with devops engineering orchestration of these applications. This is called "microservices architecture," vs the old way of "monolithic architecture."

Containers were initially stateless to encourage flexibility and portability, but containerized stateful applications and even containerized databases are now available. This gives users the flexibility and speed of using containers, but with the persistent storage and context of statefulness. Containerization also, however, blurs the line between stateful apps and stateless apps, and makes container implementation more complex, necessitating automation and container management solutions like Kubernetes .

No matter how complex your microservices architecture becomes, if the client state is stored on the server, it is stateful, and won't scale nearly as well as a stateless application. If your client state is stored in a cookie (or cache) on the client side, it is technically stateless. This cache might contain some basic client data, which the server will use to establish historical client information, but every request will contain all necessary information to execute the request on the server.

We hope this article has helped you understand the difference between stateful and stateless applications, and sets you on the path towards skilled implementation of containerization and microservices.

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RESTful APIs

The key ingredients of RESTful APIs: resources, representations, and statelessness

Written by John Lanctot | February 24, 2023

APIs have become an essential part of the modern web, providing a simple and consistent way for clients to access and manipulate resources over the internet. Whether you are building a web application, a mobile app, or a microservice , understanding how to design and implement effective APIs is an important skill for any developer. In this article, we will introduce you to the core concepts of RESTful API development , including resources, representations, and statelessness. These concepts are the foundation of REST, a widely adopted architectural style for building scalable and reliable APIs. By understanding these concepts, you will gain a deeper understanding of how to design and implement APIs that meet the needs of your clients and users.

Definition of a resource in REST

In REST, a resource is a fundamental building block that represents a specific item of data, such as a user, a product, or an order. Resources are identified by URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers), which are unique addresses that can be used to access and manipulate the resource. In a RESTful API, each resource is treated as a separate entity that can be accessed and manipulated independently. For example, a resource for a user might be represented by the URI "/users/123", where "123" is the identifier for a specific user. The client can use HTTP methods such as GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE to access and manipulate the resource. It is important to note that resources in REST are not limited to data stored in a database. They can also represent other resources such as images, videos, or even other web services. The key principle is that resources should be treated as self-contained entities that can be manipulated through the REST API.

Manipulating resources through URIs

The client can use different HTTP methods to manipulate the resource identified by a URI. The most commonly used HTTP methods in REST include:

GET: Used to retrieve a representation of the resource. A GET request to the URI "/users/123" might return a representation of the user with an ID of 123 in JSON or XML format.
POST: Used to create a new resource. A POST request to the URI "/users" with a JSON or XML representation of the new user in the request body might create a new user in the system
PUT: Used to update an existing resource. A PUT request to the URI "/users/123" with a JSON or XML representation of the updated user in the request body might update the user with an ID of 123 in the system.
DELETE: Used to delete a resource. A DELETE request to the URI "/users/123" might delete the user with an ID of 123 from the system.

What is the importance of resources in REST API design?

Resources play a crucial role in the design of RESTful APIs. Some of the key benefits of using resources in REST API design include:

Modularity: Resources provide a clear structure for organizing data and functionality in the API. This makes it easier to design and maintain the API over time, as well as to add new features and capabilities.
Scalability: Resources are typically designed to be self-contained entities that can be accessed and manipulated independently. This makes it easier to scale the API to handle large numbers of requests, as well as to add or remove resources as needed.
Interoperability: Resources in RESTful APIs are typically identified by URIs, which are standard, well-understood addresses. This makes it easier for different clients and services to communicate with each other using the API.
Reusability: Resources can be used across multiple endpoints in the API , which increases the overall efficiency and reusability of the API.
Flexibility: Resources can be easily extended to support new features and capabilities, which makes it easier to evolve the API over time without breaking existing clients.

Definition of representations in REST

In REST, a representation is a way of encoding a resource so that it can be transmitted over the internet. A representation typically includes the data associated with a resource, such as the properties of a user or the details of an order, as well as metadata that provides information about the format of the representation. In REST, resources can be represented in a variety of formats, including JSON, XML, and HTML, among others. The choice of representation format depends on the specific requirements of the client and server. The choice of representation format is typically determined by the client, which can specify the desired format using the "Accept" header in an HTTP request. The server, in turn, can provide the desired representation using the "Content-Type" header in the HTTP response. This makes it possible for clients to access resources using the format that is most appropriate for their needs, and for servers to support multiple representation formats if necessary. It is important to note that representations in REST are not limited to simple data structures. They can also include complex documents, such as HTML pages, that can be rendered directly in a web browser. The key principle is that representations should be self-contained and should include all the information necessary to understand and manipulate the resource.

How does content negotiation enable clients and servers to agree on the format of representations?

Content negotiation is a mechanism in RESTful APIs that enables clients and servers to agree on the format of the representation that is exchanged between them. This allows clients and servers to support multiple representation formats and to dynamically choose the best format for a specific request based on factors such as the client's preferred format, the server's capabilities, and the type of resource being requested. In REST, content negotiation is achieved through the use of the "Accept" and "Content-Type" headers in HTTP requests and responses. The "Accept" header in a client request indicates the preferred representation formats that the client is able to process. The server, in turn, examines the "Accept" header and selects the best representation format based on the formats it supports and the preferences indicated by the client. The selected representation format is then indicated in the "Content-Type" header of the server's response. For example, consider a client that wants to request information about a resource in either JSON or XML format. The client can send an HTTP GET request with the following "Accept" header: Accept: application/json, application/xml;q=0.9 This header indicates that the client prefers to receive the representation in JSON format, but is also able to accept XML format with a lower preference (indicated by the "q=0.9" value). The server will examine the "Accept" header and choose the best representation format based on its capabilities and the client's preferences. If the server supports both JSON and XML formats, it might choose to send the representation in JSON format in response to this request. Content negotiation enables clients and servers to dynamically choose the best representation format for a specific request, based on factors such as the client's preferences, the server's capabilities, and the type of resource being requested. This helps to ensure that the representation format is well-suited to the needs of both the client and server, and enables RESTful APIs to support a wide range of client and server environments.

Definition of statelessness in REST

Statelessness is a key characteristic of REST and refers to the requirement that each request to a RESTful API must contain all the information necessary to understand and execute the request, without relying on any context or state that is stored on the server. In other words, the server does not maintain any state or memory of previous requests from the client, and each request is treated as an isolated, independent operation. The benefits of statelessness in REST include:

Scalability: Statelessness allows for easy horizontal scaling of RESTful APIs, as each request can be handled by any server in a cluster without the need for the server to maintain any state information.
Resilience: Statelessness makes it easier to build resilient RESTful APIs that can handle failures and recover quickly, as each request can be redirected to another server in the event of a failure.
Simplicity: Statelessness makes it easier to design, implement, and maintain RESTful APIs, as the server does not need to manage complex state information or manage the persistence of state information across requests.
Cacheability: Statelessness enables RESTful APIs to be cached more easily, as the response to a request can be stored in a cache without the need to store any state information.

How does statelessness help improve scalability and reliability of REST APIs?

Statelessness helps to improve the scalability and reliability of REST APIs in the following ways:

Scalability: In a stateless REST API, the server does not maintain any state information or context about previous requests. This makes it easier to scale the API horizontally by adding more servers to handle additional requests. Each server can handle any request independently, without the need to coordinate with other servers or access shared state information. This allows for a more flexible and scalable architecture, as the API can easily handle increased traffic by adding more servers to the cluster.
Resilience: A stateless REST API is also more resilient in the face of failures. If a server goes down, the API can continue to operate without interruption by redirecting requests to other servers in the cluster. This reduces downtime and improves the overall reliability of the API. Additionally, because state information is not stored on the server, it is easier to recover from failures, as there is no need to restore complex state information.
Load balancing: In a stateless REST API, the server does not maintain any state information, making it easier to distribute requests across multiple servers. Load balancers can route requests to the server that is best suited to handle the request, based on factors such as server load and performance. This helps to improve the overall performance and reliability of the API, as requests can be handled more efficiently by the most appropriate server.

Overall, statelessness is a key characteristic of REST that helps to ensure that REST APIs are scalable, resilient, and reliable. By eliminating the need to maintain state information, statelessness simplifies the design and implementation of RESTful APIs, and makes it easier to build APIs that can handle large amounts of traffic and are able to recover from failures quickly.

Why are these concepts significant in web development and API design?

The significance of the core concepts of REST in web development and API design can be summarized as follows:

Resources: Resources are the central focus of RESTful APIs and provide a clear and consistent way to identify and manipulate entities. By defining the resources that an API exposes, developers can create an intuitive and easily navigable API that makes it easy for clients to access and manipulate the data they need.
Representations: Representations provide a flexible and powerful way for clients and servers to exchange information. By using content negotiation, the API can provide representations in a variety of formats, such as JSON, XML, HTML, and others, allowing clients to choose the format that best suits their needs. This helps to ensure that the API is accessible to a wide range of clients, regardless of their technical capabilities.
Statelessness: Statelessness is a key characteristic of RESTful APIs that helps to ensure scalability, reliability, and maintainability. By eliminating the need to maintain state information on the server, statelessness enables the API to be more flexible and scalable, and helps to ensure that the API is more resilient in the face of failures.

Overall, these concepts are essential in web development and API design as they help to create APIs that are intuitive, flexible, scalable, and reliable. By following the principles of REST, developers can build APIs that provide a simple and consistent way for clients to access and manipulate resources, and that are well suited to the needs of modern web and mobile applications.

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Best practices for REST API security: Authentication and authorization

If you have a REST API accessible on the internet, you're going to need to secure it. Here's the best practices on how to do that.

Most apps that use a modern web framework will have one or more REST APIs . REST is a simple and flexible way of structuring a web API. It’s not a standard or protocol, but rather a set of architectural constraints.

There are three reasons you might find yourself writing a REST API:

To give a networked client that you built—for instance, a single-page app in the browser or on a mobile app on a phone—access to data on your server.
To give end users, both people and programs, programmatic access to data managed by your application.
To let the many services that make up your app's infrastructure communicate with each other.

Any API built for these reasons can be abused by malicious or reckless actors. Your app will need an access policy—who can view or modify data on your server? For instance, only the author [ Editor’s note: the editors, too] of a blog post should be able to edit it, and readers should only be able to view it. If anyone could edit the post you’re reading, then we’d get vandals, link farmers, and others changing and deleting things willy nilly.

This process of defining access policies for your app is called authorization. In this article, we'll show you our best practices for implementing authorization in REST APIs.

Always use TLS

Every web API should use TLS (Transport Layer Security). TLS protects the information your API sends (and the information that users send to your API) by encrypting your messages while they're in transit. You might know TLS by its predecessor's name, SSL. You'll know a website has TLS enabled when its URL starts with https:// instead of http://.

Without TLS, a third party could intercept and read sensitive information in transit, like API credentials and private data! That undermines any of the authentication measures you put in place.

TLS requires a certificate issued by a certificate authority, which also lets users know that your API is legitimate and protected. Most cloud providers and hosting services will manage your certificates and enable TLS for you. If you host a website on Heroku, enabling TLS is a matter of clicking a button. If you host on AWS, AWS Certificate Manager combined with AWS Cloudfront will take care of you. If you can, let your host manage your certificates for you—it means no hassle at all and every API call will be automatically secured.

If you're running your own web server without any third-party services, you'll have to manage your own certificates. The easiest way to do this is with Let's Encrypt, an automated certificate authority. Let's Encrypt has a helpful getting started guide .

Use OAuth2 for single sign on (SSO) with OpenID Connect

Nearly every app will need to associate some private data with a single person. That means user accounts, and that means logging in and logging out. In the past, you may have written login code yourself, but there's a simpler way: use OAuth2 to integrate with existing single sign-on providers (which we'll refer to as "SSO").

SSO lets your users verify themselves with a trusted third party (like Google, Microsoft Azure, or AWS) by way of token exchange to get access to a resource. They'll log in to their Google account, for instance, and be granted access to your app.

Using SSO means that:

You don't have to manage passwords yourself! This reduces the user data you store and therefore less data to be exposed in the event of a data breach.
Not only do you avoid implementing login and logout, but you also avoid implementing multi-factor authentication.
Your users don't need a new account and new password—they've already got an account with an SSO provider like Google. Less friction at signup means more users for you.

OAuth2 is a standard that describes how a third-party application can access data from an application on behalf of a user. OAuth2 doesn’t directly handle authentication and is a more general framework built primarily for authorization . For example, a user might grant an application access to view their calendar in order to schedule a meeting for you. This would involve an OAuth2 interaction between the user, their calendar provider, and the scheduling application.

In the above example, OAuth2 is providing the mechanism to coordinate between the three parties. The scheduling application wants to get an access token so that it can fetch the calendar data from the provider. It obtains this by sending the user to the calendar provider at a specific URL with the request parameters encoded. The calendar provider asks the user to consent to this access, then redirects the user back to the scheduling application with an authorization code. This code can be exchanged for an access token Here's a good article on the details of OAuth token exchange ..

You can implement authentication on top of OAuth2 by fetching information that uniquely identifies the user, like an email address.

However, you should prefer to use OpenID Connect. The OpenID Connect specification is built on top of OAuth2 and provides a protocol for authenticating your users. Here's a getting started guide on OAuth2 with OpenID Connect .

Unfortunately, not every identity provider supports OpenID Connect. GitHub, for instance, won't let you use OpenID Connect. In that case, you'll have to deal with OAuth2 yourself. But good news—there's an OAuth2 library for your programming language of choice and plenty of good documentation!

Tips for OAuth

You can use OAuth2 in either stateless or stateful modes. Here’s a good summary on the differences .

The short version: it is typically easier to correctly implement a stateful backend to handle OAuth flows, since you can handle more of the sensitive data on the server and avoid the risk of leaking credentials. However, REST APIs are meant to be stateless. So if you want to keep the backend this way, you either need to use a stateless approach or add an additional stateful server to handle authentication.

If you opt to implement the stateless approach, make sure to use its Proof Key for Code Exchange mode, which prevents cross-site request forgery and code injection attacks.

You'll need to store users' OAuth credentials. Don't put them in local storage—that can be accessed by any JavaScript running on the page! Instead, store tokens as secure cookies. That will protect against cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. However, cookies can be vulnerable to cross-site request forgery (CSRF), so you should make sure your cookies use SameSite =Strict.

Use API keys to give existing users programmatic access

While your REST endpoints can serve your own website, a big advantage of REST is that it provides a standard way for other programs to interact with your service. To keep things simple, don't make your users do OAuth2 locally or make them provide a username/password combo—that would defeat the point of having used OAuth2 for authentication in the first place. Instead, keep things simple for yourself and your users, and issue API keys. Here's how:

When a user signs up for access to your API, generate an API key: var token = crypto.randomBytes(32).toString('hex');
Store this in your database, associated with your user.
Carefully share this with your user, making sure to keep it as hidden as possible. You might want to show it only once before regenerating it, for instance.
Have your users provide their API keys as a header, like curl -H "Authorization: apikey MY_APP_API_KEY" https://myapp.example.com
To authenticate a user's API request, look up their API key in the database.

When a user generates an API key, let them give that key a label or name for their own records. Make it possible to later delete or regenerate those keys, so your user can recover from compromised credentials.

Encourage using good secrets management for API keys

It's the user's responsibility to keep their secrets safe, but you can also help! Encourage your users to follow best practices by writing good sample code. When showing API examples, show your examples using environment variables, like ENV["MY_APP_API_KEY"].

(If you, like Stripe, write interactive tutorials that include someone's API key, make sure it's a key to a test environment and never their key to production.)

Choose when to enforce authorization with request-level authorization

We've been speaking about API authorization as if it will apply to every request, but it doesn't necessarily need to. You might want to add request-level authorization : looking at an incoming request to decide if the user has access to your resources or not. That way, you can let everyone see resources in /public/, or choose certain kinds of requests that a user needs to be authenticated to make.

The best way to do this is with request middleware. Kelvin Nguyen over at Caffeine Coding has a nice example here .

Configure different permissions for different API keys

You'll give users programmatic API access for many different reasons. Some API endpoints might be for script access, some intended for dashboards, and so on. Not every endpoint will need the user's full account access. Consider having several API keys with different permission levels.

To do this, store permissions in the database alongside the API keys as a list of strings. Keep this simple at first: "read" and "write" are a great start! Then, add a request middleware that fetches the user and the permissions for the key they've submitted and checks the token permissions against the API.

Leave the rest of the authorization to the app/business logic

Now that you've started adding authorization to your API, it can be tempting to add more and more logic to handle more checks. You may end up with nested if-statements for each resource and permission level. The problem with that is that you may end up duplicating application logic. You'll find yourself fetching database records in the middleware, which is not ideal!

Instead, leave that level of authorization logic to your application code. Any authorization checks made on resources should happen in the app, not in the middleware. If you need to handle complex authorization logic in your app, use a tool like Oso , which will let you reduce your authorization policy to a few simple rules.

There's always more to discuss with authentication and authorization, but that's enough to get started! We hope these tips help you design useful and secure API endpoints.

In summary: use good libraries

We’ve given you plenty of specific advice, but it all comes back to one point—try to offload as much work as you can to trusted libraries. Authorization is tricky, and we’d like to minimize the number of places in which we can make a mistake. You have plenty of great tools at hand to help with authorization, so make the best use of them that you can! Much like with cryptography: study up, and then do as little as possible yourself.

Back to all guides

Introduction to REST API Principles

Tue Oct 26 2021

These days REST APIs are used everywhere for client-server communication. Developers are also adopting GraphQL, but a staggering amount still uses RESTful APIs regularly. REST API uses HTTP methods like the GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE to request a server perform a particular action.

Let’s look at six ground principles of REST API laid down by Dr. Fielding (creator of REST API) .

Representational State Transfer (REST) API

Before we discuss the principle, here is a quick overview of a REST API: REST APIs allow you to perform CRUD (create, read, update, and delete) operations between a client and a server. It connects your backend with your frontend so they can communicate with each other.

REST API Principles

The REST API is stateless meaning that every HTTP request happens in complete isolation. When the client makes the HTTP request, it will contain all the necessary information to make the server understand the requests sent from the client.

Client-Server

Both the client and the server are completely autonomous in every way. Their communication will only happen using the REST API. This improves the portability of the codebase across multiple platforms and also helps with making the server scalable.

Uniform Interface

REST API provides four interfaces to achieve uniformity.

Resource identification
Resource manipulation using representations
Self-descriptive messages
Hypermedia as the engine of application state

REST API is often made cacheable to improve the performance of the application. It reduces the server load and the client uses the cached response if the user is requesting the same resources. It also dynamically decreases the load time of your application.

Layered System

REST API relies on layered system architecture where applications are allowed to be more stable by limiting the component behavior. This helps with improving the application security as components in each layer cannot interact beyond the next immediate layer they are in.

Code on Demand

This is not a required constraint. It allows a client code to be downloaded and to be used within the application.

REST API Tutorial

REST Architectural Constraints

REST defines 6 architectural constraints which make any web service – a truly RESTful API i.e. Uniform interface, Client–server, Stateless, Cacheable, Layered system, Code on demand (optional).

Written by: Lokesh Gupta

Last Updated: November 6, 2023

REST stands for Re presentational S tate T ransfer, a term coined by Roy Fielding in 2000. It is an architecture style for designing loosely coupled applications over the network, that is often used in the development of web services.

REST does not enforce any rule regarding how it should be implemented at the lower level, it just puts high-level design guidelines and leaves us to think of our own implementation.

In my last employment, I designed RESTful APIs for a major telecom company for two good years. In this post, I will be sharing my thoughts apart from standard design practices. You may not agree with me on a few points, and that’s perfectly OK. I will be happy to discuss anything with you with an open mind.

Let’s start with standard design-specific stuff to clarify what ‘Roy Fielding’ wants us to build. Then we will discuss my thoughts, which will be more towards finer points while you design your RESTful APIs.

Architectural Constraints

REST defines 6 architectural constraints that make any web service – a truly RESTful API.

Uniform interface
Client-server
Layered system
Code on demand (optional)

1. Uniform interface

As the constraint name itself applies, you MUST decide APIs interface for resources inside the system which are exposed to API consumers and follow religiously. A resource in the system should have only one logical URI, and that should provide a way to fetch related or additional data. It’s always better to synonymize a resource with a web page .

Any single resource should not be too large and contain each and everything in its representation. Whenever relevant, a resource should contain links (HATEOAS) pointing to relative URIs to fetch related information.

Also, the resource representations across the system should follow specific guidelines such as naming conventions, link formats, or data format (XML or/and JSON).

All resources should be accessible through a common approach such as HTTP GET and similarly modified using a consistent approach.

Once a developer becomes familiar with one of your APIs, he should be able to follow a similar approach for other APIs.

2. Client-server

This constraint essentially means that client applications and server applications MUST be able to evolve separately without any dependency on each other. A client should know only resource URIs, and that’s all. Today, this is standard practice in web development, so nothing fancy is required from your side. Keep it simple.

Servers and clients may also be replaced and developed independently, as long as the interface between them is not altered.

3. Stateless

Roy fielding got inspiration from HTTP, so it reflected in this constraint. Make all client-server interactions stateless. The server will not store anything about the latest HTTP request the client made. It will treat every request as new. No session, no history.

If the client application needs to be a stateful application for the end-user, where the user logs in once and does other authorized operations after that, then each request from the client should contain all the information necessary to service the request – including authentication and authorization details.

No client context shall be stored on the server between requests. The client is responsible for managing the state of the application.

4. Cacheable

In today’s world, the caching of data and responses is of utmost importance wherever they are applicable/possible. The webpage you are reading here is also a cached version of the HTML page. Caching brings performance improvement for the client side and better scope for scalability for a server because the load has been reduced.

In REST, caching shall be applied to resources when applicable, and then these resources MUST declare themselves cacheable. Caching can be implemented on the server or client side.

Well-managed caching partially or completely eliminates some client-server interactions, further improving scalability and performance.

5. Layered system

REST allows you to use a layered system architecture where you deploy the APIs on server A, and store data on server B and authenticate requests in Server C, for example. A client cannot ordinarily tell whether it is connected directly to the end server or an intermediary along the way.

6. Code on demand (optional)

Well, this constraint is optional. Most of the time, you will be sending the static representations of resources in the form of XML or JSON. But when you need to, you are free to return executable code to support a part of your application, e.g., clients may call your API to get a UI widget rendering code. It is permitted.

All the above constraints help you build a truly RESTful API, and you should follow them. Still, at times, you may find yourself violating one or two constraints. Do not worry; you are still making a RESTful API – but not “truly RESTful.”

Notice that all the above constraints are most closely related to WWW (the web). Using RESTful APIs, you can do the same thing with your web services that you do to web pages.

Happy Learning !!

About Lokesh Gupta

JSON Schema

Http methods.

A REST API (also called a RESTful API or RESTful web API) is an application programming interface (API) that conforms to the design principles of the representational state transfer (REST) architectural style. REST APIs provide a flexible, lightweight way to integrate applications and to connect components in microservices architectures.

First, defined in 2000 by computer scientist Dr. Roy Fielding in his doctoral dissertation, REST provides a relatively high level of flexibility, scalability and efficiency for developers. For these reasons, REST APIs have emerged as a common method for connecting components and applications in a microservices architecture.

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All API requests for the same resource should look the same, no matter where the request comes from. The REST API should ensure that the same piece of data, such as the name or email address of a user, belongs to only one uniform resource identifier (URI). Resources shouldn’t be too large but should contain every piece of information that the client might need.

In REST API design, client and server applications must be completely independent of each other. The only information that the client application should know is the URI of the requested resource; it can't interact with the server application in any other ways. Similarly, a server application shouldn't modify the client application other than passing it to the requested data via HTTP.

REST APIs are stateless, meaning that each request needs to include all the information necessary for processing it. In other words, REST APIs do not require any server-side sessions. Server applications aren’t allowed to store any data related to a client request.

When possible, resources should be cacheable on the client or server side. Server responses also need to contain information about whether caching is allowed for the delivered resource. The goal is to improve performance on the client side, while increasing scalability on the server side.

In REST APIs, the calls and responses go through different layers. As a rule of thumb, don’t assume that the client, and server applications connect directly to each other. There may be a number of different intermediaries in the communication loop. REST APIs need to be designed so that neither the client nor the server can tell whether it communicates with the end application or an intermediary.

REST APIs usually send static resources, but in certain cases, responses can also contain executable code (such as Java applets). In these cases, the code should only run on-demand.

REST APIs communicate through HTTP requests to perform standard database functions like creating, reading, updating and deleting records (also known as CRUD) within a resource.

For example, a REST API would use a GET request to retrieve a record. A POST request creates a new record. A PUT request updates a record, and a DELETE request deletes one. All HTTP methods can be used in API calls. A well-designed REST API is similar to a website running in a web browser with built-in HTTP functionality.

The state of a resource at any particular instant, or timestamp, is known as the resource representation. This information can be delivered to a client in virtually any format including JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), HTML, XLT, Python, PHP or plain text. JSON is popular because it’s readable by both humans and machines—and it is programming language-agnostic.

Request headers and parameters are also important in REST API calls because they include important identifier information such as metadata, authorizations, uniform resource identifiers (URIs), caching, cookies and more. Request headers and response headers, along with conventional HTTP status codes, are used within well-designed REST APIs.

Although flexibility is a big advantage of REST API design, that same flexibility makes it easy to design an API that’s broken or performs poorly. For this reason, professional developers share best practices in REST API specifications.

The OpenAPI Specification (OAS) establishes an interface for describing an API in a way that allows any developer or application to discover it and fully understand its parameters and capabilities. This information includes available endpoints, allowed operations on each endpoint, operation parameters, authentication methods and more. The latest version, OAS3 , includes with hands-on tools, such as the OpenAPI Generator, for generating API clients and server stubs in different programming languages.

Securing a REST API also starts with industry best practices. Use hashing algorithms for password security and HTTPS for secure data transmission. An authorization framework like OAuth 2.0 can help limit the privileges of third-party applications.

Using a timestamp in the HTTP header, an API can also reject any request that arrives after a certain time period. Parameter validation and JSON Web Tokens are other ways to ensure that only authorized clients can access the API.

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REST API Tutorial – REST Client, REST Service, and API Calls Explained With Code Examples

Ever wondered how login/signup on a website works on the back-end? Or how when you search for "cute kitties" on YouTube, you get a bunch of results and are able to stream off of a remote machine?

In this beginner friendly guide, I will walk you through the process of setting up a RESTful API. We'll declassify some of the jargon and have a look at how we can code a server in NodeJS. Let's dive a bit deeper into JavaScript!

Get that jargon away

So, what is REST? According to Wikipedia:

Representational state transfer ( REST ) is a software architectural style that defines a set of constraints to be used for creating Web services. RESTful Web services allow the requesting systems to access and manipulate textual representations of Web resources by using a uniform and predefined set of stateless operations

Let's demystify what that means (hopefully you got the full form). REST is basically a set of rules for communication between a client and server. There are a few constraints on the definition of REST:

Client-Server Architecture : the user interface of the website/app should be separated from the data request/storage, so each part can be scaled individually.
Statelessness : the communication should have no client context stored on server. This means each request to the server should be made with all the required data and no assumptions should be made if the server has any data from previous requests.
Layered system : client should not be able to tell if it is communicating directly with the server or some intermediary. These intermediary servers (be it proxy or load balancers) allow for scalability and security of the underlying server.

Okay, so now that you know what RESTful services are, here are some of the terms used in the heading:

REST Client : code or an app that can access these REST services. You are using one right now! Yes, the browser can act as an uncontrolled REST client (the website handles the browser requests). The browser, for a long time, used an in-built function called XMLHttpRequest for all REST requests. But, this was succeeded by FetchAPI , a modern, promise based approach to requests. Others examples are code libraries like axios , superagent and got or some dedicated apps like Postman (or an online version, postwoman !), or a command line tool like cURL !.
REST Service : the server. There are many popular libraries that make creation of these servers a breeze, like ExpressJS for NodeJS and Django for Python.
REST API : this defines the endpoint and methods allowed to access/submit data to the server. We will talk about this in great detail below. Other alternatives to this are: GraphQL, JSON-Pure and oData.

So tell me now, how does REST look?

In very broad terms, you ask the server for a certain data or ask it to save some data, and the server responds to the requests.

In programming terms, there is an endpoint (a URL) that the server is waiting to get a request. We connect to that endpoint and send in some data about us (remember, REST is stateless, no data about the request is stored) and the server responds with the correct response.

Words are boring, let me give you a demonstration. I will be using Postman to show you the request and response:

The returned data is in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) and can be accessed directly.

Here, https://official-joke-api.appspot.com/random_joke is called an endpoint of an API. There will be a server listening on that endpoint for requests like the one we made.

Anatomy of REST:

Alright, so now we know that data can be requested by the client and the server will respond appropriately. Let's look deeper into how a request is formed.

Endpoint : I have already told you about this. For a refresher, it is the URL where the REST Server is listening.
Method : Earlier, I wrote that you can either request data or modify it, but how will the server know what kind of operation the client wants to perform? REST implements multiple 'methods' for different types of request, the following are most popular: - GET : Get resource from the server. - POST : Create resource to the server. - PATCH or PUT : Update existing resource on the server. - DELETE : Delete existing resource from the server.
Headers : The additional details provided for communication between client and server (remember, REST is stateless). Some of the common headers are: Request: - host : the IP of client (or from where request originated) - accept-language : language understandable by the client - user-agent : data about client, operating system and vendor Response : - status : the status of request or HTTP code. - content-type : type of resource sent by server. - set-cookie : sets cookies by server
Data : (also called body or message) contains info you want to send to the server.

Enough with the details – show me the code.

Let's begin coding a REST Service in Node. We will be implementing all the things we learnt above. We will also be using ES6+ to write our service in.

Make sure you have Node.JS installed and node and npm are available in your path. I will be using Node 12.16.2 and NPM 6.14.4.

Create a directory rest-service-node and cd into it:

Initialize the node project:

The -y flag skips all the questions. If you want to fill in the whole questionnaire, just run npm init .

Let's install some packages. We will be using the ExpressJS framework for developing the REST Server. Run the following command to install it:

What's body-parser there for? Express, by default, is incapable of handling data sent via POST request as JSON. body-parser allows Express to overcome this.

Create a file called server.js and add the following code:

The first two lines are importing Express and body-parser.

Third line initializes the Express server and sets it to a variable called app .

The line, app.use(bodyParser.json()); initializes the body-parser plugin.

Finally, we are setting our server to listen on port 5000 for requests.

Getting data from the REST Server:

To get data from a server, we need a GET request. Add the following code before app.listen :

We have created a function sayHi which takes two parameters req and res (I will explain later) and sends a 'Hi!' as response.

app.get() takes two parameters, the route path and function to call when the path is requested by the client. So, the last line translates to: Hey server, listen for requests on the '/' (think homepage) and call the sayHi function if a request is made.

app.get also gives us a request object containing all the data sent by the client and a response object which contains all the methods with which we can respond to the client. Though these are accessible as function parameters, the general naming convention suggests we name them res for response and req for request .

Enough chatter. Let's fire up the server! Run the following server:

If everything is successful, you should see a message on console saying: Server is running on port 5000.

Note: You can change the port to whatever number you want.

Open up your browser and navigate to http://localhost:5000/ and you should see something like this:

There you go! Your first GET request was successful!

Sending data to REST Server:

As we have discussed earlier, let's setup how we can implement a POST request into our server. We will be sending in two numbers and the server will return the sum of the numbers. Add this new method below the app.get :

Here, we will be sending the data in JSON format, like this:

Let's get over the code:

On line 1, we are invoking the . post() method of ExpressJS, which allows the server to listen for POST requests. This function takes in the same parameters as the .get() method. The route that we are passing is /add , so one can access the endpoint as http://your-ip-address:port/add or in our case localhost:5000/add . We are inlining our function instead of writing a function elsewhere.

On line 2, we have used a bit of ES6 syntax, namely, object destructuring. Whatever data we send via the request gets stored and is available in the body of the req object. So essentially, we could've replaced line 2 with something like:

On line 3, we are using the send() function of the res object to send the result of the sum. Again, we are using template literals from ES6. Now to test it (using Postman):

So we have sent the data 5 and 10 as a and b using them as the body. Postman attaches this data to the request and sends it. When the server receives the request, it can parse the data from req.body , as we did in the code above. The result is shown below.

Alright, the final code:

REST Client:

Okay, we have created a server, but how do we access it from our website or webapp? Here the REST client libraries will come in handy.

We will be building a webpage which will contain a form, where you can enter two numbers and we will display the result. Let's start.

First, let's change the server.js a bit:

We imported a new package path , which is provided by Node, to manipulate path cross-platform. Next we changed the GET request on '/' and use another function available in res , ie. sendFile , which allows us to send any type of file as response. So, whenever a person tries to navigate to '/', they will get our index.html page.

Finally, we changed our app.post function to return the sum as JSON and convert both a and b to integers.

Let's create an html page, I will call it index.html , with some basic styling:

Let's add a script tag just before the closing body tag, so we don't need to maintain a .js file. We will begin by listening for the submit event and call a function accordingly:

First we need to prevent page refresh when the 'Add' button is clicked. This can be done using the preventDefault() function. Then, we will get the value of the inputs at that instant:

Now we will make the call to the server with both these values a and b . We will be using the Fetch API , built-in to every browser for this.

Fetch takes in two inputs, the URL endpoint and a JSON request object and returns a Promise . Explaining them here will be out-of-bounds here, so I'll leave that for you.

Continue inside the sendData() function:

First we are passing the relative URL of the endpoint as the first parameter to fetch . Next, we are passing an object which contains the method we want Fetch to use for the request, which is POST in this case.

We are also passing headers , which will provide information about the type of data we are sending ( content-type ) and the type of data we accept as response ( accept ).

Next we pass body . Remember we typed the data as JSON while using Postman? We're doing kind of a similar thing here. Since express deals with string as input and processes it according to content-type provided, we need to convert our JSON payload into string. We do that with JSON.stringify() . We're being a little extra cautious and parsing the input into integers, so it doesn't mess up our server (since we haven't implemented any data-type checking).

Finally, if the promise (returned by fetch) resolves, we will get that response and convert it into JSON. After that, we will get the result from the data key returned by the response. Then we are simply displaying the result on the screen.

At the end, if the promise is rejected, we will display the error message on the console.

Here's the final code for index.html :

I have spun up a little app on glitch for you to test.

Conclusion:

So in this post, we learnt about REST architecture and the anatomy of REST requests. We worked our way through by creating a simple REST Server that serves GET and POST requests and built a simple webpage that uses a REST Client to display the sum of two numbers.

You can extend this for the remaining types of requests and even implement a full featured back-end CRUD app .

I hope you have learned something from this. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me over twitter! Happy Coding!

Defining Stateful vs Stateless Web Services

Kristopher Sandoval

Take the difference between stateless and stateful ; an invaluable distinction within the development of APIs and the services that use those systems. Accordingly, in this piece, we’re going to briefly discuss what these terms actually mean. We’ll take a look at what makes statefulness and statelessness so different from one another, and what this actually means in terms of the API.

To understand statelessness, one must understand statefulness . When we talk about computer systems, a “ state ” is simply the condition or quality of an entity at an instant in time, and to be stateful is to rely on these moments in time and to change the output given the determined inputs and state.

If that’s unclear, don’t worry — it’s a hard concept to grasp, and doubly so with APIs. We can break this down even further — consider binary , a language of 1’s and 0’s. What this functionally represents is either “on” or “off” — a binary system cannot be both 1 and 0, and are so mutually exclusive.

Now, consider a theoretical situation in which you are given a piece of paper with these simple instructions — “if the number is 0, say no, if 1, say yes” — and you were placed into a room with a binary display which changed between the number 0 and 1 every five seconds.

This is a stateful system. Your answer will depend entirely on whether or not that clock says “0” or “1” — you cannot answer independently of the state of the grand machine. This is statefulness.

Stateful Web Services

With this in mind, what does a stateful web service looks like? Let’s say you log into a resource, and in doing so, you pass your password and username. If the web server stores this data in a backend manner and uses it to identify you as a constantly connected client, the service is stateful. Do keep in mind that this is a very specific example that exists in other forms, so what seems stateful may not necessarily be stateful — more on this later.

As you use the web service, everything you do is referenced back to this stored state. When you request an account summary, the web service asks two things:

Who is making this request?
Using the ID stored for who is making this request, what should their page look like?

In a stateful web service like this, the response formed from a simple GET request is entirely dependent on the state registered by the server. Without knowledge of that state, your request cannot be returned properly.

Another great example is FTP . When a user logs in to a traditional FTP server, they are engaging in an active connection with the server. Each change to the state of the user, such as active directory, is stored on the server as a client state. Each change made to the server is registered as a change of state, and when the user disconnects, their state is further changed to disconnected.

So far so good, right? Well, not quite. Stateful programming is fine in some very limited applications, but it has a lot of issues . First and foremost, when you have to reference a state, you’re opening yourself up to a lot of incomplete sessions and transactions. Let’s say you make a call to present a piece of data. In a stateful system where the state is determined by the client, how long is the system supposed to leave this connection open? How do we verify if the client has crashed or disconnected? How do we track the actions of the user while maintaining the ability to document changes and roll back when necessary?

While there are certainly workarounds for all of these questions, more often than not, statefulness is only really useful when the functions themselves depend on the statefulness quality. Most consumers are able to respond to the server in intelligent, dynamic ways, and because of this, maintaining server state independent of the consumer as if the consumer was simply a “dumb” client is wasteful and unnecessary .

The answer to these issues is statelessness . Stateless is the polar opposite of stateful, in which any given response from the server is independent of any sort of state .

Let’s go back to that binary room theoretical. You are given the same binary clock, only this time, the paper simply has a name — “Jack” — and the instructions are to respond when someone says the password “fish”. You sit watching the clock slowly change, and each time someone says the special password, you say the name “Jack”.

This is statelessness — there’s no need to even reference the clock, because the information is stored locally in such a way that the requests are self contained — it’s dependent only on the data you hold. The speaker could easily say the secret word, tell you to change the name, then walk away. He can then come back an hour later, say the secret password, and get the new name — everything is contained within the request, and handled in two distinct phases, with a “request” and a “response”.

This is a stateless system. Your response is independent of the “0” or “1”, and each request is self contained.

Stateless Web Services

Statelessness is a fundamental aspect of the modern internet — so much so that every single day, you use a variety of stateless services and applications. When you read the news, you are using HTTP to connect in a stateless manner, utilizing messages that can be parsed and worked with in isolation of each other and your state.

If you have Twitter on your phone, you are constantly utilizing a stateless service. When the service requests a list of recent direct messages using the Twitter REST API, it issues the following request:

The response that you will get is entirely independent of any server state storage, and everything is stored on the client’s side in the form of a cache.

Let’s take a look at another example. In the example below, we are invoking a POST command, creating a record on HypotheticalService:

In this example, we are creating an entry, but this entry does not depend on any matter of state . Do keep in mind that this is a simple use case, as it does not pass any authorization/authentication data, and the POST issuance itself contains only very basic data.

Even with all of this in mind, you can plainly see that doing a POST issuance in a stateless manner means that you do not have to wait for server synchronization to ensure the process has been properly completed, as you would with FTP or other stateful services. You receive a confirmation, but this confirmation is simply an affirmative response, rather than a mutual shared state.

As a quick note, it must be said that REST is specifically designed to be functionally stateless . The entire concept of Representational State Transfer (from which REST gets its name) hinges on the idea of passing all data to handle the request in such a way as to pair the data within the request itself. Thus, REST should be considered stateless (and, in fact, that is one of the main considerations as to whether something is RESTful or not as per the original dissertation by Roy Fielding which detailed the concept ).

Smoke and Mirrors

We need to be somewhat careful when we talk about web services as examples of stateful or stateless, though, because what seems to fall in one category may not actually be so. This is largely because stateless services have managed to mirror a lot of the behavior of stateful services without technically crossing the line.

Statelessness is, just like our example above, all about self-contained state and reference rather than depending on an external frame of reference. The difference between it and statefulness is really where the state is stored. When we browse the internet or access our mail, we are generating a state — and that state has to go somewhere.

When the state is stored by the server, it generates a session. This is stateful computing . When the state is stored by the client, it generates some kind of data that is to be used for various systems — while technically “stateful” in that it references a state, the state is stored by the client so we refer to it as stateless.

This seems confusing, but it’s actually the best way to work around the limitations of statelessness. In a purely stateless system, we’re essentially interacting with a limited system — when we would order an online good, that’d be it for us, it wouldn’t store our address, our payment methods, even a record of our order, it would simply process our payment and, as far as the server was concerned, we’d cease to be.

That’s obviously not the best case scenario, and so, we made some concessions. In the client cookie, we store some basic authentication data. On the server side, we create some temporary client data or store on a database, and reference it to an external piece of data. When we return to make another payment, it’s our cookie that establishes the state, not the non-existent session.

What’s So Bad About Sessions?

In terms of web services, the commonly accepted paradigm is to avoid sessions at all costs. While this certainly doesn’t apply to every single use case, using sessions as a method for communicating state is generally something you want to avoid.

To start with, sessions add a large amount of complexity with very little added value. Sessions make it harder to replicate and fix bugs. Sessions can’t really be “bookmarked”, as everything is stored on the server side. All of these are significant issues, but they pale in comparison to the simple fact that sessions are not scalable .

Gregor Riegler at BeABetterDeveloper gave a wonderful explanation on why this is in his piece “Sessions, a Pitfall” :

Lets say you are a professional chess player, and you’d like to play multiple people at the same time. If you’d try to remember every game and your strategy on it, you’ll hit your capacity rather quick. Now imagine you were not remembering anything of those games, and you were just rereading the chessboard on every move. You could literally play 1.000.000 people at the same time, and it wouldn’t make any difference to you. Now draw an analogy to your server. If your application gets a lot of load, you might have to distribute it to different servers. If you were using sessions, you’d suddenly had to replicate all sessions to all servers. The system would become even more complex and error prone.

Simply said, sessions don’t do what they’re designed to do without introducing a ton of overhead , and their functionality can easily be replicated using cookies, client caching, and other such solutions. There are, of course, situations in which sessions make sense, especially when servers wanted to store state without having even the slight potential of modified client runtime data.

For instance, FTP is stateful for a very good reason, as it replicates changes on both the client side and server side while delivering increased security due to the nature of the requested access. This is doable because a single person needs to access a single server for a single stated data transferral, even if the transferral involves multiple folders, files, and directories.

That’s not the case with something like a shared Dropbox, in which stateful sessions would cause the added complexity without adding value. In this case, stateless would be a much better choice.

We hope this has cleared up the difference between stateful and stateless architectures when it comes to APIs. Understanding this simple concept is the foundation upon which most architectures and designs are based upon — such lofty concepts such as RESTful design are based around these ideas, so having a sound conceptual framing is extremely important.

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Kristopher is a web developer and author who writes on security and business. He has been writing articles for Nordic APIs since 2015.

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The Essentials of API Development: A Comprehensive Guide

Tracing the lineage of the Application Programming Interface (API) unveils a history of application programming interfaces that parallels the evolution of computing itself. From the nascent stages of the 1940s to the explosive growth of web-based APIs with the Internet, these protocols and definitions have become the cornerstone of application integration and development. Like an intricate dance, APIs lead the tempo, orchestrating the complex interplay between software components, allowing developers to build upon existing services, and imbuing applications with unparalleled scalability and flexibility.

The historical context and evolution of web APIs have significantly shaped modern web development. Their applications span various fields such as e-commerce, social media, and the Semantic Web, marking a pivotal shift in how data is exchanged and utilized over the Internet.

Developers are empowered to unlock new horizons in software development as modern API practices refine the art of API management and documentation.

The Role of APIs in Software Development

APIs are the heroes of software development, powering the data exchange and functionality sharing that enable web services to flourish. For example, a weather app that displays forecasts with a flick of a finger is a testament to the versatility of public APIs, drawing from remote databases to display real-time information through the user interface of a web service. To access these APIs, developers often require an API key to ensure secure and authorized data exchange.

Serving as the nexus of communication transfer data, API endpoints are the digital engagement where software components meet, exchange data, and part ways, ready to serve the end user. It is through APIs, particularly REST APIs, that utilize functions like GET, PUT, and DELETE without maintaining client data on servers between requests that the foundation for innovation for software applications is unlimited.

Benefits of API Development

API development champions a new age of digital automation, with customization and scalability becoming the watchwords for a dynamic software landscape. The hallmark of API development is the ability to quickly develop new features in response to the ever-changing market trends. Consider platforms like Amazon API Gateway, which streamlines the management of multiple APIs and offers compelling cost benefits, making the prospect of up to one million more of API calls, services and calls openly available.

This is the fertile ground upon which developers plant the seeds of future technologies, reaping the benefits of faster communication and data exchange, and ease of implementation.

API Design Principles

The design of a software component, an API or programming language, reflects the forethought and precision put into its creation. It is the forum where decisions are made, standards are set, and the potential for diverse use cases is realized.

APIs, acting as the abstraction layer, simplify the complexity of system operations and enable straightforward interactions between disparate operating systems. They require collaboration and diligence, each stitch representing a choice that will ultimately define the very use an API’s usability within the grand architecture of software systems.

Consistency

Consistency in API design offers predictability and reliability, which developers can count on in any situation. The cornerstone allows developers to familiarize themselves with the particular API part’s rhythm, understand its nuances, and integrate its capabilities.

The meticulous application of naming conventions, data structures, structuring of resources, and adherence to HTTP methods on a web server are the threads that rely on cohesiveness, inviting developers to build with confidence using JavaScript object notation.

Flexibility

Flexibility, the ability to bend without breaking under the diverse demands of data exchange and system integrations, is the mark of a masterfully designed API. It is the chameleon in the technological ecosystem, adapting its colors to match the environment, ensuring interoperability, and contributing to the efficiency of operations. One example of flexibility in data exchange application program interface is using extensible markup language.

Security, which separates order and chaos in the digital age, is equally important in API development. Implementing a fortress of security measures, including coarse-grained and fine-grained access controls, erects a barrier against unauthorized access. The zero-trust approach, complete with HTTPS encryption and centralized OAuth servers, forms the vanguard of defense, ensuring that every last API call, endpoint and call is scrutinized for the utmost security.

Furthermore, rate limiting and caching strategies protect and optimize performance, ensuring a seamless experience for external users.

Types of APIs and Protocols

Journey through the diverse landscape of APIs and protocols, with roads as varied as the destinations they lead to. Public, partner, private, and composite APIs cater to different audiences, ranging from open developer communities to closely guarded internal systems.

Beyond availability, APIs are also distinguished by their use cases, from database to web APIs, each adhering to unique communication protocols that define their essence. Web APIs, in particular, play a pivotal role in modern web development, enabling real-time communication and interactive experiences through technologies like Websocket APIs.

RESTful (REST API) APIs

RESTful APIs, also known as REST APIs, represent the model of simplicity in the API kingdom. They leverage standard HTTP protocols in a stateless choreography of data exchange. With HTTP methods like GET, PUT, and POST serving specific roles, these APIs embody an architectural elegance that is less code-heavy and more intuitive than their SOAP counterparts.

GraphQL APIs

GraphQL APIs allow clients to define exactly what data they need, minimizing over-fetching and under-fetching. Services like AWS AppSync streamline the development of GraphQL APIs by automating the complex tasks of connecting to data sources and managing real-time updates.

SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) APIs

SOAP APIs employ the Simple Object Access Protocol to ensure data integrity across XML-based message exchanges and data transfers. Renowned for their interoperability, SOAP APIs facilitate operations across diverse platforms and languages, making them a secure choice for critical data transfer scenarios.

Tools and Technologies for API Development

API developers’ toolkit brims with specialized instruments, each designed to refine the process of API creation. From gateways that orchestrate traffic management to libraries and frameworks that set the stage for development, these tools make API architecture possible. Among these, an API management tool is crucial in streamlining the process.

API Development Frameworks

APIs are built on API development frameworks, which offer environments tailored to the requirements of different programming languages. Whether it’s Spring Boot’s streamlined approach to Java development or Flask’s explicit structure for Python, these frameworks equip developers with the tools necessary to construct robust APIs with precision and ease.

API Libraries

API libraries transform code into powerful functionalities. From Jackson’s adept handling of JSON in Java to Apache HttpClient’s management of HTTP requests, these libraries provide developers with a rich array of capabilities to augment and refine their APIs.

API Testing Tools

Testing, where tools like JUnit and Mockito stand guard for API reliability, ensuring that APIs perform as intended.

Integration testing libraries like Testcontainers further solidify an API’s robustness, preparing it for the rigors of real-world application.

Best Practices for API (Application Programming Interface) Documentation

As a compass, API documentation guides developers through the intricate maze of API capabilities, ensuring the full potential of the services offered can be harnessed. The bridge connects the creator’s intent with the developer’s execution, a well-spring of knowledge that must be clear, organized, and consistently updated.

Clarity and Organization

Well-organized API documentation, a beacon of clarity, is an invaluable educational tool, offering insights that transcend technical jargon for developers of all expertise levels. It ensures that every parameter, every sample query language response, is presented with such clarity that developers can foresee their interactions with the API even before making live calls.

Code Examples

Code examples are essential for API documentation. They enable developers to visualize and adapt APIs to their own needs, bridging the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application and enhancing the developer’s journey.

Versioning and Updates

Documentation that keeps pace with change is needed to navigate the evolving landscape of APIs. Versioning and timely updates are critical in maintaining the integrity of the documentation, assuring developers of its relevance and accuracy as the API matures.

Real-World API Development Examples

Far from mere abstractions, APIs drive real-world applications across the digital spectrum. From PayPal’s secure transactional APIs to the social login features powered by Twitter, APIs are the connective tissue enabling seamless experiences in e-commerce, travel booking, and beyond.

Challenges and Solutions in API Development

Even with the most carefully constructed APIs, challenges can still arise. Performance bottlenecks and testing hurdles are but a few of the trials that developers face. However, with robust tools and a strategic approach to API testing, solutions emerge, ensuring that APIs can fulfill their promise of reliability and correctness.

Reap the Rewards: How Moesif Empowers Exceptional API Development

By incorporating Moesif into your API development process, you gain valuable insights, optimize your API for maximum performance, and create a developer-centric experience that fosters wider adoption and success. Moesif becomes an invaluable partner, allowing you to focus on crafting exceptional APIs while it handles the critical behind-the-scenes monitoring and analysis.

As we conclude this expedition into the rich terrain of API development, we emerge with a newfound understanding of APIs’ critical role in modern software ecosystems. APIs are the golden threads that bind digital applications, from the principles that guide their design to the tools that bring them to life. This guide can serve as your compass, directing you towards mastery in API development.

Organizations looking for the best tools to support their REST API management can leverage Moesif’s powerful API analytics and monetization capabilities . Moesif easily integrates with your favorite API management platform or API gateway through one of our easy-to-use plugins , or embed Moesif directly into your API code using one of our SDKs. To try it yourself, sign up today and start with a 14-day free trial; no credit card is required.

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What’s the Difference Between gRPC and REST?

gRPC and REST are two ways you can design an API. An API is a mechanism that enables two software components to communicate with each other using a set of definitions and protocols. In gRPC, one component (the client) calls or invokes specific functions in another software component (the server). In REST, instead of calling functions, the client requests or updates data on the server.

Read about APIs »

What is gRPC?

What is rpc.

In RPC, client-server communications operate as if the client API requests were a local operation, or the request was internal server code.

In RPC, a client sends a request to a process on the server that is always listening for remote calls. In the request, it contains the server function to call, along with any parameters to pass. An RPC API uses a protocol like HTTP, TCP, or UDP as its underlying data exchange mechanism.

How is gRPC different from RPC?

gRPC is a system that implements traditional RPC with several optimizations. For instance, gRPC uses Protocol Buffers and HTTP 2 for data transmission.

It also abstracts the data exchange mechanism from the developer. For example, another widely used RPC API implementation, OpenAPI, requires developers to map RPC concepts to the HTTP protocol. But gRPC abstracts the underlying HTTP communication. These optimizations make gRPC faster, easier to implement, and more web-friendly than other RPC implementations.

What is REST?

REST is a software architecture approach that defines a set of rules to exchange data between software components. It’s based on HTTP, the standard communication protocol of the web. RESTful APIs manage communications between a client and a server through HTTP verbs, like POST , GET , PUT , and DELETE for create, read, update, and delete operations. The server-side resource is identified by a URL known as an endpoint.

REST works as follows:

The client makes a request to create, modify, or delete a resource on the server
The request contains the resource endpoint and may also include additional parameters
The server responds, returning the entire resource to the client once the operation is complete
The response contains data in JSON format and status codes

APIs built using REST guidelines are called RESTful APIs or REST APIs .

Read about RESTful APIs »

Why do organizations use gRPC and REST?

gRPC and REST are two different approaches to developing APIs.

An API operates similarly to ordering food from a restaurant via a menu. At any restaurant, a customer (client) can order food from the menu (API), which has a fixed set of dishes. This is communicated to the kitchen (server) that prepares the requested dish and sends it to the customer. The customer doesn’t need to know how the kitchen makes the order, only what to expect in return. The standardization of menu formats means customers and kitchens know how to use them.

Without APIs, there would be no shared agreement on how different applications or software services communicate. Programmers of two separate applications would need to speak to each other to determine how to build out the data exchange every time.

Different types of API architectures like gRPC and REST exist, as different ones can be better for different use cases within an organization. An API designer must choose their preferred client-server architecture based on system requirements.

What are the similarities between gRPC and REST?

REST and gRPC share some innate similarities as API architectural approaches.

Data exchange mechanism

Both allow two software components, a client and a server, to communicate and exchange data based on a shared set of rules. These rules apply regardless of how each software component operates internally.

HTTP-based communication

Both pass data via the HTTP request-response mechanism, the preferred efficient communication protocol of the web. However, in gRPC, this is hidden from the developer, while in REST, it’s more apparent.

Implementation flexibility

You can implement both REST and gRPC in a wide range of programming languages. This quality makes them both highly portable across programming environments. This leads to optimal interoperability with near-universal support.

Suitability for scalable, distributed systems

Both gRPC and REST use the following:

Asynchronous communication, so the client and server can communicate without interrupting operations
Stateless design, so the server doesn’t have to remember the client state

This means developers can use gRPC and REST to build fault-resistant systems with a large number of concurrent requests. You can build scalable, distributed systems with multiple clients.

Architecture principles: gRPC vs. REST

While REST and gRPC offer a similar function, the underlying models differ significantly in their architecture.

Communication model

Using a REST API, a client sends a single REST API request to a server, and the server then sends a single response in reply. The client must wait for the server to respond before continuing operations. This mechanism is a request-response model and is a unary data connection (one-to-one).

In contrast, with gRPC, a client can send one or multiple API requests to the server that may result in one or multiple replies from the server. Data connections may be unary (one-to-one), server-streaming (one-to-many), client-streaming (many-to-one), or bidirectional-streaming (many-to-many). This mechanism is a client-response communication model and is possible because gRPC is based on HTTP 2.

Callable operations on the server

In a gRPC API, callable server operations are defined by services, also known as functions or procedures. The gRPC client invokes these functions like you would call a function internally within an application. This is known as service-oriented design . Here’s an example:

createNewOrder(customer_id, item_id, item_quantity) -> order_id

In REST, there is a limited set of HTTP request verbs that the client can use on server resources defined by a URL. The client calls the resource itself. This is known as entity-oriented design . The entity-oriented design aligns well with object-oriented programming methods. Here’s an example:

POST /orders <headers> (customer_id, item_id, item_quantity) -> order_id

While you can design gRPC APIs in an entity-oriented approach, this is not a constraint of the system itself.

Data exchange format

With a REST API, the data structures passed between software components are typically expressed in JSON data exchange format. It is possible to pass other data formats like XML and HTML. JSON is easy to read and flexible, although it must be serialized and translated into a programming language.

In contrast, gRPC uses the Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) format by default, although it also offers native JSON support. The server defines a data structure using the Protocol Buffer interface description language (IDL) in a proto-specification file. gRPC then serializes the structure into binary format and then deserializes it to any specified programming language. This mechanism makes it faster than using JSON, which is not compressed during transmission. Protocol Buffers are not human-readable, unlike a REST API used with JSON.

Read about JSON »

Other key differences: gRPC vs. REST

Beyond architectural style, gRPC and REST have other inherent differences.

Client-server coupling

REST is loosely coupled, which means the client and the server do not need to know anything about the other's implementation. This loose coupling makes the API easier to evolve over time. This is because a change in server definitions does not necessarily require a code change in the client.

gRPC is tightly coupled, which means the client and server must have access to the same proto file. Any updates to the file require updates in both the server and the client.

Code generation

gRPC offers an inbuilt selection of client-side and server-side native code generation features. They’re available in multiple languages due to protoc, the Protocol Buffers compiler. After defining the structure in the proto file, gRPC generates the client-side and server-side code. Code generation makes API development less time-consuming.

On the other hand, REST does not offer any built-in code generation mechanisms, so developers must use additional third-party tools if they require this feature.

Bidirectional streaming

gRPC offers bidirectional streaming communication. This means both the client and the server can send and receive multiple requests and responses simultaneously on a single connection.

REST does not offer this feature.

When to use gRPC vs. REST

REST is currently the most popular API architecture for web services and microservice architectures. REST’s popularity is due to its simple implementation and data structure mapping, readability, and flexibility. It’s easy for new programmers to start developing RESTful APIs for their applications, whether for web services development or internal microservices.

Here are use cases for a REST API:

Web-based architectures
Public-facing APIs for ease of understanding by external users
Simple data communications

gRPC, unlike REST, was designed specifically to allow developers to create high-performance APIs for microservice architectures across distributed data centers. It’s better suited for internal systems that require real-time streaming and large data loads. gRPC is also a good fit for microservice architectures comprising several programming languages when the API is unlikely to change over time.

A gRPC API is better for these use cases:

High-performance systems
High data loads
Real-time or streaming applications

A note on web software development

While HTTP is the core web protocol, different versions of HTTP exist with varying degrees of adoption across web browsers and web servers.

A gRPC API always uses HTTP 2, and a REST API typically uses HTTP 1.1, which is not the same HTTP protocol. While HTTP 2 is now a common web protocol, it does not have universal browser support, unlike HTTP 1.1. This limited browser support can make gRPC a less attractive option for developers who want to support web applications.

Summary of differences: gRPC vs. REST

How can aws support your grpc and rest requirements.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has a range of services and tools to help API designers build, run, and manage API-based modern applications and services. For more information, read about building modern applications on AWS .

Here are examples of AWS offerings that can support your API requirements:

Amazon API Gateway allows developers to create, publish, and manage APIs at scale. With API Gateway, you can build RESTful APIs optimized for containerized microservice architectures and web applications.
Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) distributes network traffic to improve application scalability. It can route and load balance gRPC traffic between microservices or between gRPC-enabled clients and services. This allows seamless introduction of gRPC traffic management in the architectures—without changing any of the underlying infrastructure on the customers’ clients or services.
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) Lattice is an application networking service that consistently connects, monitors, and secures communications between your services. Scale compute and network resources automatically to support high-bandwidth HTTP, HTTPS, and gRPC workloads.

Get started with gRPC and REST on AWS by creating an account today.

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Stateful vs Stateless: Full Difference

Introduction, what is stateful, advantages of stateful, disadvantages of stateful, what is stateless, advantages of stateless, disadvantages of stateless, key differences.

As the world rapidly moves towards a future where technology plays an integral part in our lives, we may have heard the word – ‘network protocol’ quite often. So what is network protocol? A network protocol is a set of rules that govern how data is formatted, sent, and received by computer network devices, ranging from servers and routers to endpoints, regardless of their underlying infrastructures, designs, or standards. Devices on both sides of a communication exchange must accept and follow protocol norms in order to send and receive data correctly.

Network protocols can be broadly classified into two types – Stateful and Stateless. The word ‘state’ refers to the condition or the quality of being at a given point of time. Whether a protocol is stateful or stateless depends on the length of interaction a client has with it and how much of the information is stored. We need to look at the requirement basis of server or server-side software to save information on the status or details of sessions (here, a session refers to the temporary interchange of information between server and client), in order to find out the differences between the two. When it comes to definitions,’ stateful’ and ‘stateless’ have a form of mutually reliant relationship. To comprehend one, you must comprehend the other. Let us explore the topic of Stateful vs Stateless in the next few sections.

To understand what the word Stateful refers to, let us look at an analogy. Consider the scenario of a telephone call. In this case, the connection is maintained from the beginning to the end of the call to ensure continuous communication. The connection is validated first, and only then will the session be established indefinitely until the end of the talk. This is exactly what a stateful protocol is. If a client delivers a request to the server in a stateful protocol, it expects a response of some sort. If it does not receive a response, it will send the request again.

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However, the major feature of stateful is that it maintains the state of all its sessions, be it an authentication session, or a client’s request for information. Stateful are those that may be used repeatedly, such as online banking or email. They’re carried out in the context of prior transactions in which the states are stored, and what happened in previous transactions may have an impact on the current transaction. Because of this, stateful apps use the same servers every time they perform a user request. An example of stateful is FTP (File Transfer Protocol). For the course of an FTP session, which often includes many data transfers, the client establishes a Control Connection. After this, the data transfer takes place.

So, what are the advantages and disadvantages of being Stateful?

Stateful protocol keeps track of the connection information, and as a result, delivers superior performance because of continually keeping track of information.
Stateful protocols are more intuitive because they can maintain data on the server between two requests.
They can improve performance when data retrieval is required only once.
Stateful protocol requires memory allocation in order to store data.
In the event of inefficient maintenance of session storage, there can be a decrease in the performance. It requires continuous management of the service’s full lifecycle.
These protocols are highly dependent on the server-side state.
Usually, stateful protocols require backing storage.
Since the state is maintained, stateful is not very secure.

In order to comprehend what Stateless means, let us consider a scenario just like we did in the case of Stateful. Consider the event of sending an SMS. Here, the receiver’s availability is not confirmed, and the sender just sends the SMS to the recipient. There is no confirmation from the receiving device to the sending device that the message has been received. Despite being transmitted, the communication may or may not be received. There can be no cross-verification of status or retries. This is what stateless is all about.

A stateless protocol is one in which the receiver is not required to keep session state from previous requests. The sender sends relevant session state to the receiver in such a way that each request may be interpreted without reference to prior requests’ session state, which the receiver retains. HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) is an example of Stateless Protocol because each request is executed independently of the requests that came before it. This implies that once a transaction is completed, the connection between the browser and the server is also terminated.

Since the monitoring system does not have to look beyond a single request to determine its whole nature, visibility of the protocol is improved.
It is easier to recover from partial failures like crashes since no state is maintained, which improves reliability.
The server does not have to store session state between requests, hence, scalability is enhanced as deploying the services to any number of servers is possible, and implementation is simplified even more.
It only necessitates a small number of resources because the system doesn’t need to keep track of communication over numerous lines, as well as session information.
In Stateless Protocols, each individual communication is unconnected and distinct from the ones that come before or after it.
Here, each packet of data travels on its own. There is no need to refer to another packet in these packets.
It may be essential to include additional information in each request, and as a result, the server will need to interpret this new information.
They may degrade network performance by increasing the amount of repetitive data delivered in a series of requests, which cannot be saved and reused.
They are inherently less capable as they do not store information about a particular user session.

Now that we have a basic understanding of what each comprises, we can begin to clarify the primary differences between stateful and stateless.

The most significant distinction between stateful and stateless is that stateless do not “save” data, whereas stateful applications do. And as a result, the server doesn’t need to preserve server information or details of its sessions, whereas this needs to be done in stateful. A stateful application’s ability to maintain its state is crucial, but any data that goes through a stateless service is often short-lived. Any linked storage is usually transient. If the container is restarted, for example, any data stored will be lost. Running a single instance of a database for testing can be a fairly simple task when it comes to stateless. However, managing the whole life cycle of a stateful app’s service can be quite difficult. Production deployment and operation are two factors that contribute to this complexity. Both of these require highly available deployment, scaling, and error handling techniques. Each stateful data service requires or supports a certain form of storage. Furthermore, identifying the type of backing storage for a stateful application is notoriously difficult. When it comes to statelessness, none of this is required.

In a world where clients were only thin interfaces to more powerful servers, stateful architecture made sense and was a logical solution. Having a strong coupling between users and servers wasn’t an issue when services just needed to scale to hundreds or thousands of users. We’ve had to change not only hardware and software, but also design patterns and concepts, now that we have powerful client computers and web services are frequently required to grow to millions or even billions of users. And this is where stateless comes into the picture. When it comes to choosing between stateless and stateful, the answer depends upon the requirements that need to be fulfilled. Both have their own sets of pros and cons. Hopefully, the distinctions with stateful vs stateless programming are now much clearer. Grasping the differences between them is crucial when it comes to API, which leads us to gain a deeper understanding of API.

Q. What is the difference between stateful and stateless? A. The major difference between stateful and stateless is whether or not they store data regarding their sessions, and how they respond to requests. Stateful services keep track of sessions or transactions and respond to the same inputs in different ways depending on their history. Clients maintain sessions for stateless services, which are focused on activities that manipulate resources rather than the state.

Q. Is stateless better than stateful? A. In most cases, stateless is a better option when compared with stateful. However, in the end, it all comes down to your requirements. If you only require information in a transient, rapid, and temporary manner, stateless is the way to go. Stateful, on the other hand, might be the way to go if your app requires more memory of what happens from one session to the next.

Q. Is HTTP stateful or stateless? A. HTTP is stateless because it doesn’t keep track of any state information. In HTTP, each order or request is carried out in its own right, with no awareness of the demands that came before it.

Q. Is REST API stateless or stateful? A. REST APIs are stateless because, rather than relying on the server remembering previous requests, REST applications require each request to contain all of the information necessary for the server to understand it. Storing session state on the server violates the REST architecture’s stateless requirement. As a result, the client must handle the complete session state.

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Data API builder becomes Generally Available

Jerry Nixon

May 15th, 2024 8 9

Announcing Data API builder General Availability

On May 15 th , Data API builder becomes Generally Available.

Data API builder for Azure SQL Databases – Generally Available

Architecturally, DAB is a dynamic container-based, configuration-driven runtime. It’s an ASP.NET project written in C# and published under the MIT license. We use ChilliCream’s Hot Chocolate for GraphQL and FusionCache for in-memory cache. We also use Swashbuckle, Polly, and several other libraries that every developer uses in well-designed API projects.

REST endpoints

DAB offers REST endpoints with native OpenAPI support and Swagger for developers, including in-memory caching and support for OData-like query string keywords. REST in DAB is standard and typical; it is configured per-entity with granular security and flexible database policies.

GraphQL endpoints

DAB provides GraphQL endpoints with automatic schema generation and Banana Cake Pop for developers, including relational queries and nested Create mutations. GraphQL in DAB can exist with or without REST endpoints and supports the same granular and flexible security features.

Ridiculously flexible

Whether your solution is exposing a data clearinghouse, enabling a mobile application, or just playing around with an Azure database, DAB supports you. It natively connects to several backend stores, including NoSQL (Cosmos DB) and relational (Azure SQL, etc.). It also supports multiple databases simultaneously.

Data API Builder has been a bit of a dream come true for our team. We are starting to modernize all our APIs across the organization. Writing APIs from scratch was going to be a significant effort in that initiative. Data API Builder has completely changed the game for us. Not only will it now take a fraction of the time that we had planned, but the resulting APIs will also be far more mature and feature rich than we could have ever built on our own. We have begun to promote DAB within the company and believe that once other teams understand that power of the tool, they will race to adopt it as well. – Jeremy Syme, Engineering Manager, Bluetooth Special Interest Group, Inc.

Container-based

DAB is a standard Docker-friendly container. It is completely stateless and scalable. Run it in your own environment or in the cloud, it doesn’t matter. Run one or several containers against a single database or against several databases. The approach is up to you. https://aka.ms/dab/registry

Enterprise friendly

Enterprise customers demand features like Microsoft Entra Identity integration and Application Insights and CI/CD support. They also scale and require some crazy topologies. DAB delivers with flexibility, as well as the scale and performance to meet every workload.

Azure friendly

DAB with Azure Static Web Apps offers a seamless solution for integrating your database with front-end applications through its cutting-edge data connections feature, currently in preview. DAB seamlessly integrates with Azure Container Apps , Azure Container Instances, Azure Kubernetes Services, and Azure Web Apps for Containers, while also extending support to custom on-premises deployments.

Feature rich

Every endpoint requires a retry policy, comprehensive logging, in-memory cache, and the ability to map columns and filter results. But they also need solid documentation, a standards-based interface, and robust error handling. You could build it, but Data API builder already has.

Less code, more engine

Engineers love the techniques and technologies DAB uses. It’s what you would build – you just don’t have to. DAB dramatically reduces a codebase, eliminates suites of tests, and shortens CI/CD pipelines; it introduces capabilities typically reserved for the largest teams. Yet incredibly simple.

Rapid development

An early adopter, Nightingale HQ in the UK, writes sustainable software under EU contracts – mostly exposing data clearinghouses through data APIs. They recently published a white paper on their business which highly leverages Data API builder.

DAB speeds this process by only requiring the developer to control the Entity Type definitions from which the subsequent .NET types are built. Based on a rough estimate from prior projects it takes a developer a week to create a simple API representing the models and queries required by a small application, this includes researching the database schemas, writing, and testing the endpoint logic, and writing a .NET client to consume it. Amending a single endpoint to represent a significant logic or model change takes half a day to a day. Through using DAB, we have found a developer can create an API in a matter of hours and amend endpoints in minutes. If realised, these savings not only represent a reduction in time-to-result but also an implicit carbon saving during the development process. – Chris Wilson, NightingaleHQ

What does it mean to be open source? That we work and think in the open. The code is right there; we collaborate with projects like HotChocolate and FusionCache . We have a monthly community standup hosted on YouTube, our issues and discussions are managed in GitHub, and – most of all – we accept your pull . https://aka.ms/dab

Great documentation

The Data API builder team has put in a lot of time to make our docs complete and easy. We’re full of quick starts, tutorials, and conceptual articles meant to help you get started. Our reference docs are comprehensive and always evolving. Check it out at https://aka.ms/dab/docs

Command line

Our CLI is a cross-platform dotnet tool you install like this:

Then, in three lines, you can initialize, validate, and spin up an endpoint on Windows, Linux or MacOS and immediately start consuming data and building client applications. This is a simple example, but a larger and more complex database is fine, too.

It’s worth noting that Data API builder deeply supports environment variables throughout its configuration file. This is the best way to pass secrets. We also support local ENV files for engineers wanting to limit the scope of local environment variables during development.

Getting Started and Contributions

To get started with Data API builder, explore our comprehensive documentation and step-by-step guides: We look forward to your feedback and contributions. Join our GitHub Discussions, provide feedback, or start a conversation about our roadmap.

Final Thoughts

The journey from public preview to General Availability has been rewarding, and Data API builder is ready to help developers simplify database interactions, enabling more time to focus on creating outstanding user experiences and architectures.

Thank you to our community. Join us here .

Jerry Nixon Senior Program Manager, Azure SQL

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