REST resources from database tables - api

REST resources from database tables
I have recently learnt things about REST (many of them i partially understood). I also made some simple demos which are not very restful but atleast i have tried somethings of REST. But when it came to developing some real world applications starting from the scratch I am cluless.
My problem is
I have absolutely no idea, when a bunch of tables are given
how to start desigining uris out of them ?
how to decide what are the resources ...?
Can every table be a resource...?
how to tackle with one to many, many to many relations among those tables..?
All the questions above are confusing for me. Basically where to start with uri designing when a bunch of tables are thrown at your face for REST uri design! I know URI designing is not the only part that makes it REST API but still it is important one..
This question is a continuation to this one I posted earlier on SO
How to decide a resource in a restful way based on some tables
Please dont say that there is no such prescribed standard. There should be one :| . I am asking only for a way ..just some direction where to start in designin uri's from db tables

Read A Brief Introduction to REST.

This is a great REST tutorial. It has the REST architecture design and many samples.

Related

Difference between API-First and Design-API-First approach?

When I am looking into approach's used for the development of API's, I came across multiple approaches like Code-First, API-First, Design-API-First.
I clearly understand Code-First approach how it is different from other two. But I am not able to get the exact difference between API-First and Design-First approach.
Summary from links:
API First:
API's are considered as first class citizens by the organization.
You design each of your APIs around a contract written in an API
description language like Open API for consistency, reusability, and broad
interoperability.
Design-API-First:
Describing every API design in an iterative way that both humans and computers can understand before you write any code.
API design-first is about the process of creating the API itself.
In design API first approach there will be lot of collaboration in designing of the API.
My understanding by far:
I feel 1 and 2 points of Design-API-First is saying same thing as API First because for example Open API specification is understood by both humans and computers. Is there anything more to it?
So, the only difference there will be collaboration added here by involving stakeholders, developers, customers etc?
So, when we use Design API First, we can say we are also using API-First?
References:
Probably I am able to get the exact context from the following links,
please use them and see if you can get the right understand of it and
address this question.
https://blog.stoplight.io/api-first-vs.-api-design-first-a-comprehensive-guide
https://blog.axway.com/product-insights/amplify-platform/application-integration/api-first-design-api-first
https://www.ecosmob.com/design-first-or-api-first-where-does-future-lies/

SQL and LUIS API

Ok this may be me not understanding things, happens a lot as I'm new at stuff, but what I have is a database in both OLTP and OLAP formats.
I've done some googling and found that I can configure them to be exposed to a http endpoint so my question is, can I expose them to the LUIS http API endpoint?
Essentially I want to use the service to be trained as people ask questions of my data. I deal a lot with hospital data so it would be things matching intentions of Diagnosis of chest pains = complaining of chest pain.
I don't a full detailed answer of how to do it if it is possible, rather I'm more interested in a straight yes or no ,so I can know whether to dig into this or not. Text analytics is next on my list, but it doesn't have the ability to start learn what the intention and why people are asking the question like LUIS does.

Spring Data Rest Without HATEOAS

I really like all the boilerplate code Spring Data Rest writes for you, but I'd rather have just a 'regular?' REST server without all the HATEOAS stuff. The main reason is that I use Dojo Toolkit on the client side, and all of its widgets and stores are set up such that the json returned is just a straight array of items, without all the links and things like that. Does anyone know how to configure this with java config so that I get all the mvc code written for me, but without all the HATEOAS stuff?
After reading Oliver's comment (which I agree with) and you still want to remove HATEOAS from spring boot.
Add this above the declaration of the class containing your main method:
#SpringBootApplication(exclude = RepositoryRestMvcAutoConfiguration.class)
As pointed out by Zack in the comments, you also need to create a controller which exposes the required REST methods (findAll, save, findById, etc).
So you want REST without the things that make up REST? :) I think trying to alter (read: dumb down) a RESTful server to satisfy a poorly designed client library is a bad start to begin with. But here's the rationale for why hypermedia elements are necessary for this kind of tooling (besides the probably familiar general rationale).
Exposing domain objects to the web has always been seen critically by most of the REST community. Mostly for the reason that the boundaries of a domain object are not necessarily the boundaries you want to give your resources. However, frameworks providing scaffolding functionality (Rails, Grails etc.) have become hugely popular in the last couple of years. So Spring Data REST is trying to address that space but at the same time be a good citizen in terms of restfulness.
So if you start with a plain data model in the first place (objects without to many relationships), only want to read them, there's in fact no need for something like Spring Data REST. The Spring controller you need to write is roughly 10 lines of code on top of a Spring Data repository. When things get more challenging the story gets becomes more intersting:
How do you write a client without hard coding URIs (if it did, it wasn't particularly restful)?
How do you handle relationships between resources? How do you let clients create them, update them etc.?
How does the client discover which query resources are available? How does it find out about the parameters to pass etc.?
If your answers to these questions is: "My client doesn't need that / is not capable of doing that.", then Spring Data REST is probably the wrong library to begin with. What you're basically building is JSON over HTTP, but nothing really restful then. This is totally fine if it serves your purpose, but shoehorning a library with clear design constraints into something arbitrary different (albeit apparently similar) that effectively wants to ignore exactly these design aspects is the wrong approach in the first place.

OOD / OOP Etudes / Code exercises

I've been searching the web for some time now. I am looking for small sample exercises for OOD practice (& for some internal TDD workshops).
If there is one single place, where this need is being served, please point me to it.. and close this question
Constraints:
Language-agnostic real world problem
Small : Something that takes an hour to two at max to solve (or has sub-parts that can fit this constraint).
Not Algorithm centred : Not be focussed on just solving a computational task. (There are multiple sites that serve this category.) Involve > 2 interacting entities.
Solved by multiple people, preferably yourself : Goodness verified. Links preferred. Please do not post something that may be a good exercise... subjective
Similar SO question 60109, but the answers dont meet my need here. I found that I've lost my touch (was thrashing ideas) with OOD after prolonged exposure to a day-job. Need to get it back..
Update: Are we collectively out of short OOP exercises ? I was hoping that I'd have a bunch to pick from. However my web-searches (this is a diff exercise in formulating the right search string) and the lack of responses here seem to indicate otherwise. Maybe I posted to SO at a bad time.. in which case bumping this thread for more responses.
http://butunclebob.com/ArticleS.UncleBob.TheBowlingGameKata
http://schuchert.wikispaces.com/Monopoly%28r%29
Jeff Bay's Object Calisthenics. Following these will improve your OO skills.
Bill Wake's spreadsheet TDD challenge
Dave Thomas' CodeKata
Kindness,
Dan
From the AGPPnP book by Robert Martin aka UncleBob
CoffeeMaker Mark IV - Page 2 has the problem statement
Questionnaire Practice Problem
A problem I've worked on in a couple of different jobs is that of writing some generic, data-driven survey/questionnaire functionality. It's not majorly complex, but has enough interesting avenues to be a good OOD practice problem I think. It's definitely real-world and crops up in a lot of places.
You can start off thinking about how to structure a Survey. It is obviously made up of Questions, but do you also want Categories? Can a Question have subquestions? Can a subquestion have subquestions? How deep can you go?
A question probably needs to have potential Scores. What types of scores can you have? What types of questions can you have (multiple choice, multiple answer, freetext, etc.)?
Once you've got the basic business logic, you can also think about how you display a survey . Maybe you have a SurveyRenderer and a QuestionRenderer? How do you decide how to render different types of questions? (Maybe you use a Strategy pattern... as in this SO question.) How do you render a read-only version of the survey?
You can also think about persistence. How do you record responses to a blank questionnaire? How does your object graph of a survey get mapped into a database (or some other backing store), and vice versa?

Understanding WCF

Could anyone point me to a resource that explains WCF with pictures and simple code snippets. I am tired of googling and finding the same "ABC" articles in all search results.
WCF is a very complex technology that in my opinion is very poorly documented. It is incredibly easy to get up and running with, but the performance tuning to run a large scale app can be incredibly complicated and a lot of trial and error. One day everything is working fine and then you find out that only a single Channel is kept waiting for a new connection and that there is a config setting that you need to adjust on a custom binding to allow more channels to be waiting so that calls don't fail inbetween when a channel is used and the next channel is spun up.
In general Nicholas Allen's blog is a gold mine of information. However Windbg has been my best friend in trying to explain some very bizarre behavior coming from WCF.
Here's a really simple example. It's specific to CE/Mobile devices, but the concept is no different PC to PC.
I found the following two books to be really good for getting up to speed on WCF:
Programming WCF Services (Lowy - O'Reilly)
Pro WCF (Peiris, Mulder - Apress)
They both start with more of a conceptual description of WCF, so you understand the concepts and terms. This is really useful, because it allows you to narrow any google searches to more specific concepts.
And this is an article that breaks down understanding WCF and why it was developed in a simple, bulleted list.