Monthly Archives: November 2022

Software Solutions

As software designers and developers, we can often run into errors and issues during our development process. Design patterns however, provide a general reusable solution for the common problems that occur in software design. These patterns are known to typically show relationships between classes or objects. The overall idea is to speed up the development process by providing well tested, proven development/design paradigms. We can even use patterns in our own designs as it will only make our design more flexible, more resilient to change, and even easier to maintain. There are multiple different types of patterns that are extremely well known to designers and developers across the globe. These patterns are categorized into three different types, Creational, Structural, and Behavioral.

The Creational design patterns are all about object creation or class instantiation. The benefit of creational design patterns is that they enable a design to become more flexible and applying a creational pattern removes hard coded behavior or can move it into a higher level interface. Class creation uses inheritance in the instantiation process and defers creation to subclasses. Object creation uses delegation in the instantiation process and defers some of the creation to other objects. Some of the most common creational design patterns include the Factory Method, Abstract Factory, Builder, Prototype, and Singleton. Structural design patterns are a little different from the creational patterns, but they allow us to create large, flexible, and efficient structures. This pattern eases the design process by identifying a simple way to realize relationships. Some common types of Structural patterns may include, Adapter, Bridge, Composite, Flyweight, Proxy, and many more. More than often this design pattern will result in some form of abstraction and inheritance between two objects. Lastly, Behavioral design patterns is a pattern that strictly defines communication between objects, as well as classes. This pattern is solely for the purpose of increasing the flexibility of communication. There are many behavioral design patterns but some may include, Command, Iterator, Meditator, Memento, Observer, Strategy, and many more.

Design patterns are extremely useful and important to learn about as they can help accelerate the development process and help save time without needing to reinvent a new pattern every time a problem arises. They can especially be useful when you’re at the beginning of your journey as design patterns are a good starting point. Even if you won’t use them right away in your first projects, getting to know them will help you understand the existing solutions you’re using. The simplest and most complex solutions are all made up of different patterns.

https://jtearl188.medium.com/the-3-types-of-design-patterns-6138e353715b

From the blog CS@Worcester – Conner Moniz Blog by connermoniz1 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

REST API Design!

This week in CS-343 I’ve been getting familiar with REST APIs. This is not the only time I’ve had to use a REST API; I had to use them in my project last year for operating systems. REST APIS as explained in the stack overflow blog “Best Practices for REST API design” are one of the most common kinds of web services available today. It allows various clients including browser apps to communicate with a server via REST API. It’s important to design the REST API so that the client can properly and effectively communicate with the server.

First, what is a REST API? A REST API is an application programming interface that conforms to specified architectural constraints, like stateless communication and cacheable data. It is not a protocol or standard. REST APIs should accept JSON for request payload and response to JSON. JSON is the standard for transferring data. On another note, while transferring dates, I didn’t use JSON in my project, instead, I ended up using Curl. A curl is a command-line tool for transferring data, and it supports about 22 protocols, including HTTP.  It’s very good when testing REST services, but the blog and most sources I would say would recommend JSON for requests/responses. I was familiar with JSON files, it’s common, but now I understand why using JSON is the more optimal.

Endpoint paths are used to grab/modify whatever information you might want from the REST service. The most common ones are GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. GET retrieves resources, POST submits new data to the server, PUT updates existing data, and DELETE removes date.  Creating routes are how we can use these endpoints. For example, let’s say that we have a route called article, POST /articles/ is for adding a new article, PUT /articles/:id is for updating the article with given id, DELETE /articles/:id is for deleting an existing article with given ID.

To avoid any confusion when an error occurs, we have HTTP response codes so that we can figure out the root of a problem, the common HTTP status codes include 400 Bad Request This means that client-side input fails validation. 401 Unauthorized – This means the user isn’t not authorized to access a resource. It usually returns when the user isn’t authenticated. 403 Forbidden – This means the user is authenticated, but it’s not allowed to access a resource.404 Not Found – This indicates that a resource is not found. 500 Internal server error – This is a generic server error. It probably shouldn’t be thrown explicitly. 502 Bad Gateway – This indicates an invalid response from an upstream server. 503 Service Unavailable – This indicates that something unexpected happened on server side (It can be anything like server overload, some parts of the system failed, etc.).

This doesn’t cover all the details of REST API but for the most part, this will get you a decent understanding of how it all works.

Link To “Best Practices for REST API design” : https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/03/02/best-practices-for-rest-api-design/

From the blog CS@Worcester – FindKelvin by Kelvin Nina and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Week 8-What is an API

View at Medium.com

For this week I wanted to dive a little deeper on the APIs that we has begin to work with in the previous lab, it interested me how these systems work and wanted to see how different examples out in the world worked and how it related to how we interact with the systems themselves.

In the blog the author goes deep into how the API System are very apparent throughout the world and how they work, the best example I saw was a calendar system on google. The user would send a request to googles remote server and then the server would respond with the site to allow the user too book on the calendar, one the user set the date the request would be sent back to the server and a response would be sent back to the user. As someone who uses other systems like booksy to book haircuts with my barber its interesting how the API allows me to book it on my end while it does all of the work for me interacting with the server and changing my barbers calendar to integrate my appointment.

In the case of the work we did in the lab it is interesting to see how the API used for the pantry relates to some of the APIs discussed in the blog, when we worked we saw the all of the different actions in that API which led to either the collection as a whole or individual students when we looked to post new details or retrieve details. It is interesting to see how similarly the example we worked on works with the blogs APIs, where ours is more adding students taking food or putting food in the pantry, while also logging what is taken or what is put in, there examples is access to a Weather API to check weather in certain areas or the facebook API to give the user their profiles information.

One part that the Blog focuses on heavily is Object Oriented design, where there is a large list of objects and each object has an API which allows the objects to interact with one another, much of what is said leads back to our earlier lab seasons focusing on the different design models and which ones work better, the API aspect of it is now made relevant on how these objects interact with each-other on the users side.

Gazarov, Petr. “What Is an API? in English, Please.” Medium, We’ve Moved to FreeCodeCamp.org/News, 10 Oct. 2016, https://medium.com/free-code-camp/what-is-an-api-in-english-please-b880a3214a82.

From the blog cs@worcester – Marels Blog by mbeqo and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.