Exploring Popular Languages & Frameworks for Building Effective REST APIs

One of the most popular types of API is REST or known as RESTful APIs. RESTful APIs were designed to take advantage of existing protocols. While REST (Representational State Transfer) can be used over nearly any protocol, when used for web APIs it typically takes advantage of HTTP. So, developers have no need to install additional software or libraries when creating a RESTful API. REST APIs are pretty much everywhere. They are the standard method to expose databases to clients and knowing how to develop a REST API is a necessity at all layers of the stack.

One of its key features is it provides a great deal of flexibility. REST can handle multiple types of calls, return different data formats and even change structurally with the correct implementation of hypermedia. This flexibility allows developers to build an API that meets the client's needs while also meeting the needs of very diverse customers.

With all of the information out there, it could be hard to decide on what programming language and frameworks to select for your next product or project. Because any language or frameworks can ultimately be used to write APIs, some can be better and more efficient to use than others.

So, here are some best languages and frameworks to create your Rest API.

Best Languages

PHP

PHP is a server-side scripting programming language intended for web development but also utilized as a general-purpose programming language. This language Code may be inserted into the HTML language Code, or it can be utilized in mixture with different web template systems, CMS, and other website frameworks. The PHP code is often processed by a PHP interpreter integrated as a module in the web server or as a CGI executable.

Python

Python is a powerful high-level, object-oriented programming language created by Guido van Rossum. It has simple easy-to-use syntax, making it the perfect language for someone trying to learn computer programming for the first time. This is a comprehensive guide on how to get started in Python, why you should learn it and how you can learn it. Python is a general-purpose language. It has a wide range of applications from Web development (like Django and Bottle), scientific and mathematical computing (Orange, SymPy, NumPy) to desktop graphical user Interfaces (Pygame, Panda3D). The syntax of the language is clean and length of the code is relatively short. It's fun to work in Python because it allows you to think about the problem rather than focusing on the syntax.

HTML5

HTML5 is a new version of the programming HTML, with unique attributes, new elements, and new behaviors, and a higher set of technologies that lets the making of more different and powerful Web and app. It adds specific processing standards to encourage more interoperable implementations; it enhances and justify the markup available for docs, and presents markup and API for complicated web applications.

TypeScript

TypeScript (TS) is an open source language created and handled by Microsoft. It is a strict syntactical superset of JavaScript and provides free static writing to the coding. TS is intended for development of large applications and organizes to JavaScript. It’s started from the considered shortcomings of JavaScript for the web and app development of big-scale applications both at Microsoft and among their outside clients. Challenges with managing difficult JavaScript code led to a need for custom tooling to ease developing of elements in the language.

Elixir

Elixir is a dynamic, functional programming language intended for developing scalable and manageable applications. Functional programming supports a coding design that assists developers to write the program that is compact, fast, and maintainable. It's utilized by organizations such as Moz, Pinterest, and E-MetroTel. It is also used for web development companies such as Discord, Inverse, and Bleacher Report, and for building web embedded systems.

Best Frameworks

Laravel

Laravel is an open-source web-based PHP application structure with expressive and exquisite grammar that can make a web application more easy to use, available and captivating. By and large, Laravel designers utilize local Laravel capacities to create different web application development advancement extends so they can give the customers the best forefront arrangements. Laravel is the top PHP framework. It supports MVC architecture.

Django

Django is the best tool to develop REST APIs. Django itself is an amazing framework for developing web applications. It's based on Python. This tool is just exceptionally well designed. You can get up to speed really quickly, just by following the tutorials on their website. It also comes with really cool built-in features, so creating an API is usually really easy. It has built-in functionality that allows you to browse your API, which is styled automatically with a clean, modern design. The data is also divided into pages for browsing pleasure.

Slim

Use the Slim Framework. It's a PHP micro framework that helps you to quickly write simple yet powerful web applications and RestFul APIs. You can use it as the back-end web service to support some of the PhoneGap mobiles and Angular JS front-end apps. Slim uses a simple concept for its middleware. By wrapping HTTP requests and responses it unifies the middleware into a single method call.

Express

Express takes advantage of Node NPM to distribute and install countless plugins made by third parties which solve almost anything a developer would want to do with Express. Setting up a new Express project is very easy. Express.js is really well documented. Everything is covered and they are very helpful for beginners and advanced developers alike.

Spring boot

Spring boot is built for fast prototyping. The boot is just a thin configuration layer over Spring Framework, as such it inherits all the strengths of Spring.

Ruby on Rails

There are many third-party plugins (Ruby gems) available for Rails development. The larger ones and those that have a lot of downloads and users are very well documented and easy to use. Ruby has a very clean syntax that makes code easier to both read and write than more traditional Object Oriented languages, such as Java. For beginning programmers, this means the focus is on the meaning of the program, where it should be, rather than trying to figure out the meaning of obscure characters.

Sinatra

Since it has very few dependencies, the loading time for a Sinatra app is considerably small. Sinatra has taken the approach of having only the most useful components needed to build applications out of the box. It has simple routes along with a Domain Specific Language over a Rack layer.

Yii

Yii comes with great security features out of the box to help developers create a secure and reliable application. These security features contain but are not restricted to: Input validation Output filtering Features against SQL injection Cross-site scripting prevention. Yii Framework Provides most of the features required for crud functionalities like GridView, Listview, and DetailView (with jquery search and validation functions) by generating using GII. Yii uses Composer to handle its dependency installation. This is rather easy and not a very time to consume, although it should be noted that the Composer is very resource-intensive considering what its job is.

ASP.Net Core

Since 2002 developers have had access to ASP.Net to develop web software using Microsoft’s .Net framework and any supported .Net language. Most cloud systems are clusters of smaller machines that get jobs distributed to them and work together to provide a highly available system.

Flask

Flask is the lightweight choice for developing REST APIs in python. It has very little impact on system resources and provides very easy methods to provide information as HTTP endpoints in a format easy to read by the recipient. It also includes HTML templating.

Phoenix

The Phoenix back end development framework works with Erlang Virtual Machine (VM), that makes better use of resources. It is capable of handling a large number of users simultaneously, by virtue of its high speeds. Like Ruby on Rails or Python Django, it is written in Elixir and follows the MVC pattern on the server side.

 

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