Is there a standard out-of-the-box way to access an API using GET or POST in TypeScript?
I only find libaries that do that like fetch or superagent suggested here when using React or HttpClient suggested here when using React.
I wonder though if there is a plain an simple way from within TypeScript to consume a REST API.
I wonder though if there is a plain an simple way from within TypeScript to consume a REST API.
Lets simplify REST API to be *I want to make GET and POST requests. The fact that it is a REST style API is not relevant.
I want to make GET and POST requests
Native ways of doing this depends on the JavaScript environment. e.g. Browser's traditional API has been XMLHttpRqeuest : https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/XMLHttpRequest which is fully supported by TypeScript. A newer API is fetch which is also supported by TypeScript but might not be supported by the browser you are targetting.
On node you would use http module https://nodejs.org/api/http.html
Suggestion
Now if you want an API that works across both node and old browsers you will need some library that abstracts the native features. One suggestion is axios which works with TypeScript out of the box.
Related
I am currently evaluating the framework "wolkenkit" [1] for using it in an application. Within this application I will have a user interface for tenant-based data management. Only authenticated users will have access to this application.
Additionally there should be a public REST API following common standards and being callable by public (tenant security done with submission of a tenant-based API Key within the request headers).
As far as I have found out, the wolkenkit REST API does not seem to fit these standards in forms of HTTP verbs.
But as wolkenkit at all appears to me as a really flexible and easy-to-use framework, I wonder how to basically implement such a public API.
May it be e.g. a valid approach to create an own web application which internally connects to the wolkenkit backend? What about the additional performance overhead then?
[1] https://www.wolkenkit.io/
In addition to the answer of mattwagl, I would like to point out a few things that you may be interested in.
First of all, since wolkenkit is based on CQRS, the application has a separate API for writing and reading. That means, that if you send a command (whose intent is to change state) this goes to the write API. If you subscribe for events or run a query, this goes to the read API.
This again means, that if you send a command, it's up to the write side to respond to it. As the write side is not meant to return application state, all it says is basically: "Thanks, I have received the command." To get the actual result you have to wait for the appropriate event, which means subscribing to the read API.
In the wolkenkit documentation there is a nice diagram which shows this in a clear way:
If you now add a separate REST API (which actually fulfills the requirements of REST), this means that you need to handle waiting for the result internally. In other words: Clients in wolkenkit are always meant to be asynchronous, REST is not. Hence it's your job to handle the asynchronous behavior of the wolkenkit APIs in your REST API. I think that this is the hardest part.
Once you have done this, you will have a synchronous REST API, and of course it will have some overhead. But I think that since its overhead is limited to passing through and translating network requests, it should be negligible.
Oh, and finally, there is another thing that you have to watch out for: Since REST as it was meant originally relies on the HTTP verbs to transport semantics, you need to map GET / POST / PUT / DELETE to the semantic commands of wolkenkit. As long as this can be done 1:1, everything's fine – problems start when there are multiple commands that (technically speaking) do an UPDATE.
PS: I'm also one of the developers of wolkenkit.
PPS: However you are going to solve this, I would be highly interested to hear from you! It would be very great if you could share your experiences with us, as you are most probably not the last one with this idea. If you want to contact us, the easiest way would be via Slack.
wolkenkit applications can be accessed using an HTTP- and a Websocket-API. These APIs are both provided by the tailwind module that wolkenkit uses under the hood. In the tailwind repo you can find a very simple documentation of the available HTTP routes.
You're right, the wolkenkit HTTP-API is not a classic REST-API. It's more RPC-style which in our experience is a good fit for applications. There are only 3 routes that your clients/tenants need to support: /v1/command (POST) is used for issuing commands. The commands you post should follow the command schema. /v1/events (POST) can be used for streaming events to clients. These events will follow the event schema. Finally you have /v1/read/:modelType/:modelName (POST) to read models. You can simply use HTTPie to test these routes.
Authentication of these APIs is currently done using OpenID-Connect. There's a very detailed article on how to setup authentication using Auth0. I'm not quite sure if this fits your use-case but you could basically use any Authentication Service that follows this standard or that is able to issue JWT tokens.
Finally you could also build your own JavaScript client-SDK that runs inside browsers by building a module that uses the wolkenkit-client-js under the hood. This SDK can just use the same API as any other client to connect to your application.
Hope this helps.
PS: Please note that I am one of the authors of wolkenkit.
I'm trying to use the Swagger UI, and it says that I should begin by writing an api-doc that describes the exact api for a REST api. The problem is that I have no idea what this means. Is this document written in plain English? Or is there a certain format that will be able to generate the UI?
Thank you!
Swagger is a specification for describing REST APIs. Documentation of the specification can be found here - https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-spec.
Generally, there are two ways to document your API. If you already have an existing API with code, you can use any of the existing libraries (https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-spec#additional-libraries) to integrate into your code and generate documentation at run time. Some of those libraries also offer offline generation of such docs.
If you're looking to design an API, or would rather not integrate another library into your application, you can use https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-editor either locally or with the online version - http://editor.swagger.io.
Once you have the documentation, you can use Swagger UI to visualize and test it.
What are some web apps that allow me to play with any REST APIs visually (by clicking) and also get some code generated (in any language) that captures what I have described visually?
Similar to Swagger or Google API Playground but allows me to talk to anything that speaks REST (assuming I have the proper auth credentials and I know what messages it understands).
Bonus points for something that can also "discover" what messages are understood, given a URL endpoint.
Microsoft has 2 that I know of
OData API explorer
The data market service explorer (requires signing in, and then you can access free data sets)
Considering that REST API's are going to follow their own conventions, terms, and have their own documentation (hopefully), this is an impossible problem. If you restrict your quest to visualizing API's that follow a "standard" form of self-documentation (see REST web service WSDL? for some hopeful scenarios) you might be able to accomplish this.
Or you can use something like http://www.programmableweb.com/ to discover tutorials, tools, examples, and mashups of various existing APIs.
You could mock an API at http://apiary.io/.
You could explore and existing one through tools (e.g. REST Console for Chrome)
What you can't have, is one-size-fits-all explorer for "every possible REST API." Some APIs follow conventions that others don't.
apigee and apihub (now part of mulesoft) are two that I frequently visit. Of the two, apigee is my preferred provider.
One of the reasons that you're not going to see a lot of websites like this is because of the same-origin policy. This means that you can't access a RESTful API located at api.google.com from a web app running at, say, www.restfiddle.com without sending all the API traffic through restfiddle.com's servers. Sites like JSFiddle can exist (and are used widely) because all the processing is done on the client side.
Browser plugins, however, are exempt from the same-origin policy. If you're using Chrome, try Postman. If your REST client doesn't need to be web-based, check out SoapUI. IntelliJ IDEA has a nice REST client as well.
Try Restlet Studio, it's the only visual API designer I've found, and seems pretty good, it imports and exports swagger & RAML.
http://studio.restlet.com/
I'm working with NodeJS + Mongoose, writing a Single Page Application, so I need to serve some statics and then all the interaction between frontend and backend is done via XHR. Eventually I'm thinking about writing a native mobile app accessing the same backend. Is there any pattern / best practice I should apply here?, I thought that I may need to extract the API to be exposed via Restify, and handle the requests from the webapp only with ExpressJS? or should I just put all the stuff exposed via Restify? I guess my confusion comes from not being worked with Restify before, so any explanation about how is it different from ExpressJS (specially when talking about a Single Page App) is really welcome.
I am implementing a similar solution, mobile app & website with expressjs and backbonejs. I did not use restify because i did not think i needed the extra complexity, there were not that many API endpoints so expressjs handled everything ok for me.
BTW take a look at this post on restify performance, I just saw it today and have not personally validate the contents.
Benchmarking APIs using PerfectAPI vs Express.js vs Restify.js « « PerfectAPI Blog PerfectAPI Blog http://bit.ly/xrTguB
Restify is packaging DTrace and various handlers that Express doesn't. If you just have one API endpoint and don't need DTrace, it doesn't make sense to run Restify.
Also, you might want to try express-resource
From all the various examples of Ember.js, I have not been able to figure out if there is a default method in Ember.js to do REST AJAX calls. Many examples build their own interfaces for CRUD operations. I even tried to sift through the code to find any reference to AJAX calls but came up with nothing.
So, my question is, is there a default implementation of REST API in Ember.js. If yes, how do I use it? Also if, for a specific application, I want to build custom CRUD methods, where do I plug these into Ember.js?
It seems that Ember Data is what you are looking for. It is part of emberjs organiztion in GitHub.
[2014-02-18: Deprecated - I no longer support ember-rest because it is overly simplistic, and would recommend using ember-data for most ember projects. Check out the Ember guides for an overview of ember-data as well as this example project ]
While learning Ember, I decided to create a very simple Ember REST library. I also wrote an example Rails CRUD app.
My goals were to keep this project as simple as possible, while still including error handling and validation. Ember REST is certainly much leaner than Ember Data and Ember Resource, and I hope you'll find the code well commented and accessible.
There is a Ember Resource library aiming REST JSON interfaces. It provides Ember.Resource class with save(), fetch() and destroy() operations that could be easily overriden. Looks like it should be more mature than Ember Data for now.
Ember.js can work nicely with Ember Data. That said, there is a specific format of REST to follow. When followed, you can streamline the process of connecting API with Ember and have so much less work.
In case you use custom REST, the place to adjust is:
adapter - to inform from where you like to get data
serializer - how data should be adjusted for custom REST API