CODEWITHSUNDEEP
restbackbone.jsarchitecturemarionette
HCdev
HCdev

Reputation: 550

RESTful API Architecture

I'm developing a project to be used by both a smartphone app and a single page app website. I'm using Backbone.js for my data binding.

I've got a bit of an architectural question: How do I make my API restful, yet enrich the data coming back in my models.

An example:

I would like to change the roles of a user in a group.

In the restful case, I'd load a collection of the roles for a particular user in the group. I'd check and uncheck the roles I'd like to apply to the user in the context of that group, then save. I'm therefore doing a GET for the array of roles and a PUT to save the altered list. The issue I am facing is that I need to enrich my model with more meta data such as the Group's name, the User's name etc so the user has some context when editing the data.

I can quite easily do this but then I'm not really restful anymore with my model.

Does anyone have any resources they can point me to that can help me to architect my solution to achieve the best of both RESTfulness and usability using Backbone.js?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1810

Answers (2)

Ming Chan
Ming Chan

Reputation: 1948

Backbone model does not make your application more or less restful. For the most part, rest is about the interactions between the HTTP client and server. Like in REST API URI Design Approach question, mostly the focus is on the URI design.

The more practical way of thinking or applying REST as the starting point (at least it works for me) is to think in the following ways:

1) Use only HTTP ‘GET/POST/PUT/DELETE’ as the way to model your domain ‘actions’ . Just like when you dealing with database, all your actions are mapped to CURD.

2) URI/URL is to identify resources only. Should never have any ‘actions’ in your URI.

3) The data exchanged should be in the body of the HTTP messages. Just to simplify the discussions, not getting into how to model the data itself

Two great books on rest.

Upvotes: 1

Praveen Prajapati
Praveen Prajapati

Reputation: 989

You can create a Restful web service which can be consumed in both smartphone app and a single page app website.

Please have a look at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/hongyes/archive/2012/08/30/single-page-application-with-backbone-js-and-asp-net-web-api.aspx

Here they are creating SPA with backbone.js and ASP.NET Web API ( to create Restful web service).

Other great resource can be found here: http://www.asp.net/single-page-application/overview/templates/backbonejs-template

Thanks.

Upvotes: 0

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