Practical Implementation of 10 Rules for Writing REST APIs

Abstract

This paper shows a practical implementation of “10 Rules for Writing REST APIs introduced in the article” (Hradil, 2016). The application is done in Invoice Home (Wikilane, 2016), an invoicing web application for small business and entrepreneurs available world-wide. The API is implemented in JSON hypermedia format (ECMA International, 2016) and with Ruby on Rails framework (Hansson, 2016). The main purpose of the API is to allow connection of Invoice Home with external systems and offer Invoice Home data in simpler format compared to the current HTML format of the full-stack web application. The paper could be also used as a basic template or pattern for any other implementation of the JSON API in any web-based application.