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Ask HN: What's the best way to develop a RESTful API in 2016?

1 points by pier25 ↗ HN
I know. Best is relative, pick the tool for the job, etc.

I just want to know what would HN users recommend.

Is the classic approach of handcrafting endpoints and permissions still the way to go?

Is there some new tool that easily abstract those common and repetitive tasks (routes, permissions, auth, etc)?

We've been considering ArangoDB with Foxx for our next enterprise project to be able to have relational document based data. Foxx seems to be a great tool for rapidly developing an API.

2 comments

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krsyoung
I still lean heavily on the framework to help with the API aspects (i.e. Rails, Sinatra, Express, Flask ...). I now consistently (at least in my mind) document the APIs via Open API Specification (swagger) and use that for documentation.

For DB-centric projects I've used things like StrongLoop and DreamFactory which makes turning a DB into a REST API very simply. Key is that the DB is just being turned into REST ... no much logic in the middle.

Foxx looks cool, have not tried it but claims to be similar to Sinatra.

For exposing, it really depends if you are exposing internally or externally. Worth checking out something like Kong to act as your API gateway and leave some of the complexity out of the backend services when / if possible.

pier25
Thanks for all the great info. DreamFactory looks super interesting.