The REST API has been around for a long time now and is usually the preferred way of making network calls. Due to its simplicity, popularity, and ease of use, it continues to be the go-to API development standard for startups and established organizations alike.
Although syntax differs from language to language, the basic principle and structure remain the same.
Amongst all the languages, REST API is greatly favored in NodeJS applications. The REST API is usually the ideal choice for simple CRUD operations where data is not too complex. NodeJS provides excellent support for developing REST APIs. In this article, we will discuss how to develop a REST API in NodeJS.
Let us discuss some of the advantages that make it easier to develop applications using REST API in a NodeJS environment. Thereafter, we will take a look at how Amplication can further make the development cycle more intuitive.
Advantages of REST API and NodeJS
Ease of Development
First things first, the ease of adaptability determines the usage of just about anything, be it a framework, library, SDK, etc. The number of users is determined by how well the developers are able to make use of it, or how well the usage is documented.
NodeJS has a mature community with many active contributors actively working to make it better. Thus, even if you get stuck, you can be assured that you are likely to find the solution in a short time.
Availability of Proven Frameworks
As mentioned above, NodeJS has an active contributor community enabling the runtime to have various proven frameworks like express, hapi, restify, etc. With frameworks like express, it is simple to create
If you are dealing with databases and other components of the cloud, you might as well make use of architectural patterns like
Performance
It wouldn’t be wrong to say that NodeJS is on par with other popular languages when it comes to handling requests. Typically, if an API has to deal with a database or other intensive operations, the code is stalled until the transaction is completed. In order to process other subsequent requests, the server spawns multiple threads resulting in increased consumption of memory and processing time.
On the other hand, NodeJS undertakes this task differently, it uses a single thread with a non-blocking I/O, which drastically improves the performance of the application. This is made possible by concurrently handling multiple requests on a single thread. All the operations that are time-consuming are executed asynchronously using the worker threads.
This paradigm is really effective and scalable because it is not waiting for any read or write operations and is essentially always accepting queries. Due to its efficiency and lightweight working mechanism, it can handle millions of requests at once.
Versioning
A REST API can have multiple versions, with new endpoints added in an incremented version or a few endpoints being deprecated in a newer release. Versioning and documentation are fairly simple with NodeJS. It enables relatively simple changes to published APIs so that your users are always aware of what is new for them in the API. The developer can easily communicate updates and warnings to the user by storing all this API version information in a URL.
Pagination and Filtering
With APIs, you can query a chunk or subset of a larger dataset instead of fetching all of it. The latter causes performance issues for the end user, resulting in a bad user experience. Moreover, it might also fetch data that the user never needed. Since a REST API can be a dynamic endpoint, it is possible to paginate and return results in smaller parts, which makes the fetching process light and efficient.
Additionally, data can also be filtered to return just the required fields, cutting down on the query payload.
Creating a NodeJS App Using Amplication with REST API
Coding an entire application from scratch can be boring and difficult at times, mainly because the process is not a visual one and you will have to deal with lots of errors (every programmer's nightmare). One of the building blocks of creating a NodeJS application or any application for that matter is data modeling. How is the data represented? What properties does it contain?
How is it related to other data?
Such modeling requires critical thinking and breaking down the larger problem into smaller chunks. To make things easier in this regard, we can useAmplication - an open-source NodeJS application development environment. It comes with built-in role-based access control and the ability to develop data models. The resulting source code can also be immediately downloaded or pushed as a project on GitHub. Since any application is built on top of a data model, we’ll be creating this data model using Amplication here.
Visit Amplication and sign up for an account with GitHub. To register for an Amplication account, you must already have a GitHub account. You must first create a new project after creating your account.
A new service that contains the source code, entities, roles, and other information must be generated as soon as a new project is started. By selecting the "New Service" option located in the upper right corner, you may create a new service and give it whatever name you desire.
It is now time to develop the data models and link them to other models after creating the service. Since a data model is different properties bound together, it can be considered an entity.
Click on ‘Go to entities’.
We now need to add the entities that represent the necessary distinct data. Add the required entities and their properties mapped to their respective types by clicking on "Add entity" in the top right corner of the page.
Once an entity is created, properties like id, created at, and updated at are automatically added. In our case, the last two values are optional, so you are free to leave them alone or delete them.
If a model is associated with a non-primitive data type, we can establish an association with the non-primitive data, which can be created by following the same steps mentioned above.
Simply open the entity > Add field and give the field the name of the non-primitive data. Note that the non-primary data should be created before establishing an association.
Set the data type to "Relation to entity" and the associated entity to the non-primitive data.
After creating the data models, you can build the application by committing the changes. Once you have finished building it, you may access the source code or link to a GitHub repository to push the modifications.
You can download the source code to your local system and make the necessary adjustments there.
Conclusion
NodeJS is a great environment to set up REST APIs because of its efficient performance, scalability, and streaming support. Numerous pre-made and practical modules for working with pure HTTP(s), REST API, web services, sockets, etc., are available and may be used to build APIs and implement interaction with already-existing applications. Tools like Amplication can be used to create complex data models intuitively.