API Design Principles and Best Practices

Welcome to the first lesson in our 'Building RESTful APIs with Phoenix' course! A well-designed API is crucial for building scalable and maintainable applications.

In this lesson, we'll dive into the fundamental principles and best practices for designing clean, consistent, and user-friendly RESTful APIs. Let's get started!

REST (Representational State Transfer) is an architectural style for networked applications. A RESTful API is one that adheres to these principles:

• Client-Server: Separation of concerns.
• Stateless: Each request from client to server must contain all information needed.
• Cacheable: Responses can be cached to improve performance.
• Layered System: Client cannot tell if it's connected directly to end server or an intermediary.
• Uniform Interface: The core of REST, simplifying interactions.

It's about interacting with resources using standard HTTP methods.