I chose the blog post, “Best Practices for REST API Design” by John Au-Yeung because it addresses the best practices developers should be following when it comes to utilizing REST API. The blog shows us strategies that we can use so we can create items to the best of our abilities. In class, we have been using the REST API since Thea’s Pantry utilizes it. Due to this, while we have been learning a lot about it due to classwork and homework, it was interesting to be able to read other perspectives such as this blog. This is really our first introduction in our computer science classes on design like this so the more we can read and learn the better.

In the blog, the author focuses on creating user-friendly APIs that adhere to widely accepted principles. The foundation of REST API design is using nouns in endpoints to represent resources, such as /users or /orders, rather than actions like /getUser. This approach keeps the API intuitive and aligns with REST conventions. HTTP methods play a vital role, with verbs like GET , POST , PUT , and DELETE defining the operations on these endpoints. The principle of statelessness is key to this design, meaning each request from a client must contain all the necessary information for the server to fulfill it. This avoids maintaining client-specific state on the server, simplifying scaling and debugging. Error handling is another essential practice. APIs should return meaningful and consistent HTTP status codes, such as 404 for “not found” or 400 for “bad request,” paired with descriptive error messages to guide users on fixing issues. For managing large datasets, pagination, filtering, and sorting should be supported. These features enhance performance by limiting the data returned and allowing clients to specify exactly what they need. APIs should adopt JSON as the standard response format, as it’s widely used and easy to parse. Including appropriate content-type headers ensures compatibility across platforms. These practices foster better user experiences, maintainability, and scalability. By following them, developers can create APIs that are reliable, predictable, and efficient, promoting successful integrations across diverse client applications.

From the blog, I was able to learn the best practices when it comes to designing using REST API. Going forward, I plan to incorporate these practices as I continue to learn more about front end work. After reading, I feel like I will be able to increase my learning in this area as well as be able to share these practices with my peers.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/03/02/best-practices-for-rest-api-design/

From the blog CS@Worcester – Giovanni Casiano – Software Development by Giovanni Casiano and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Within object oriented programming, there are four main pillars. These are known as abstraction, encapsulation, polymorphism, and inheritance. These four are essential in understanding object oriented programming and why it is important. While researching, I found a blog called “Encapsulation, Abstraction, Inheritance, and Polymorphism” by Cole Davis which I believe does a great job at explaining all four of the pillars as well as why they are important. I chose to write about this topic as I use object oriented programming all the time, and I plan to do it in the future. Because of this, I wanted to help share some information that I find to be very useful in understanding how it works in case anyone else wants to do the same.

Abstraction: One of the first major pillars you’ll learn about is known as abstraction. Cole Davis does a great job at explaining this pillar, as shown in a quote from his blog: “Abstraction is the process of combining many functions into one. Think of a thermostat. Typically, a thermostat allows the user to change the target temperature, select different modes such as heating, cooling, or fan, and turn the unit on or off. When we use a thermostat, we are unaware of the intricacies that create these functionalities under the hood. By exposing only the necessary abstracted functions to the user, we make it easier for the user to use our programs.” I really enjoyed reading this example as it relates abstraction to real-life terms instead of just using coding terms, making it a lot easier to understand. Essentially, abstraction does the same thing. It makes our code easier to understand, allowing others to get a high-level understanding of our program.

Encapsulation: The second main pillar is known as encapsulation. Encapsulation is the idea of hiding and restricting access to the implementation details of our objects. Basically, this protects the data and functions of our code from being improperly accessed by things other than our objects. It makes our code more robust and predictable, allowing others to see its purpose more clearly. Another major benefit of encapsulation is it allows us to see precisely where we can change implementation details, allowing us to safely change our program.

Inheritance: The third main pillar is known as inheritance. According to the blog “Inheritance is a technique that involves a child class “inheriting” functionality from a parent or super class.” This increases usability in our code as well as stops it from being redundant.

Polymorphism: The four main pillar is known as polymorphism. Polymorphism is a hard one to explain, but its very easy to show. Essentially, it is when child classes run the same inherited method that returns different values. They use the same method, but can return different values based on what they do. Polymorphism allows us to have a more dynamic inheritance, which enables us to use inheritance more for its values that it provides.

Link: https://medium.com/@colebuildanddevelop/encapsulation-abstraction-inheritance-and-polymorphism-26aa98042d41

From the blog CS@Worcester – One pixel at a time by gizmo10203 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

I chose the blog post, “Designing for the Unexpected” by Cathy Dutton because it addresses how one can create designs that can combat unexpected content changes. The blog shows us strategies that we can use so we don’t get stuck in situations like this. On my own time, I have been learning how to create in the web design space so that was one of the main factors when choosing this blog. This is what led me to choose this blog post, so I can learn how to not make mistakes and so I can follow the strategies laid out to design in the most efficient way possible.

In the blog, Dutton explores strategies for creating adaptable web designs that accommodate unforeseen content changes and evolving device landscapes. She reflected on the evolution from fixed-width designs to responsive layouts, emphasizing the necessity of planning for flexibility from the outset. Dutton recounts her early experiences with web design, and  highlights the challenges of transitioning to responsive design, noting that it requires comprehensive planning during the design phase rather than being an afterthought. To implement responsive designs, Dutton initially utilized percentage-based layouts with native CSS and utility classes, later incorporating Sass for reusable code and more semantic markup. Media queries played a crucial role in this process, allowing designs to adapt at specific breakpoints to maintain readability across different screen sizes. However, she observed that this method often necessitated complex markup, posing challenges for content management, especially for users without extensive HTML knowledge. Dutton introduces the concept of intrinsic design, a term coined by Jen Simmons, which leverages new and existing CSS features to create layouts that respond organically to content and available space. This approach employs the ‘fr’ unit to distribute space flexibly without compromising content legibility, enabling designs to adapt dynamically to varying content and container sizes. Intrinsic design moves beyond predefined breakpoints, fostering components that are inherently responsive. The article also discusses the limitations of relying solely on frameworks like Bootstrap for responsive design. Dutton emphasizes the importance of designing for diverse user contexts, acknowledging that users interact with websites across various environments and devices. By adopting flexible design principles and focusing on content adaptability, designers can create resilient and future-proof web experiences that cater to unforeseen changes and diverse user needs. The blog advocates for a shift towards intrinsic design methodologies that prioritize content flexibility and responsiveness. By embracing CSS advancements and moving beyond rigid frameworks, designers can craft web experiences that gracefully adapt to the unpredictable nature of content and device evolution.

From the blog, I was able to learn the best strategies when it comes to designing an adaptable web interface. Going forward, I plan to incorporate these strategies as I continue to learn more about designing web pages. After reading, I feel like I will be able to increase my learning in this area as well as be able to share these strategies with my peers.

https://alistapart.com/article/designing-for-the-unexpected/

From the blog CS@Worcester – Giovanni Casiano – Software Development by Giovanni Casiano and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

I’m very unfamiliar with REST API’s but throughout most of our classes I’ve learned that they are very important especially in moving forward with development as a career. Since I was not very familiar with the topic I wanted to look up the basics of the API’s functionality, this is the site that gave me that information https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/api/what-is-a-rest-api. This site is basically documentation describing an API, REST API and REST all in their own individual categories.

The documentation covers the basics of REST such as the client-server architecture and communication, the representation of the requester and endpoints and the format the data is actually transferred through and the guidelines of the REST functionality as well. This post also covers the topic of what an API has to include to be considered a RESTful API, disregarding the aforementioned topics it covers the specifics of how the resources that are used by the client and modified on the server should react. Cacheable data that is transferred between both the client and server is also a topic brought up which I think is actually the most important since any data lost between actions would result in a broken / useless API.

Since I’m very uninformed on the topic of REST and I haven’t setup any personal development environments to work with such a thing, so I won’t be putting much of this newly gained knowledge to use as of this moment, but learning about it for future reference will definitely help me in the long run. I’ll most likely setup the development environments needed and study up more on the internals and all of the languages that work best for this type of development since understanding server and client architecture does not only represent working with REST. It also represents working with pretty much any application that multiple of your clients will use depending on what they ask for. This also gets more into the request part of the communication which I have never really looked into in depth, so being able to see how it functions will also help my understanding of most other server-client / client-server communication.

Honestly when we first discussed REST in our classes I still didn’t really understand the entire process of what exactly was happening. Reading through this post again though, definitely clarified some of the topics we went over and more, especially more into the back-end side of the API. Going forward I will continue to research more into REST, it seems very interesting to me and again, will be very helpful in understanding more about architecture in bigger programs.

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

This week’s post will cover a powerful and popular frontend tool, Node.js, that enables developers to execute JavaScript code outside the browser. By allowing JavaScript to run on the server side, Node.js has transformed the way developers approach web development, enabling full-stack JavaScript applications. The blog by Matthew Clark highlights the common uses for Node.js, for example, Node.js is often used for building real-time applications, such as chat apps and collaborative tools. Additionally, Node.js is a popular choice for developing REST APIs and microservices, enabling efficient handling of API requests and data exchanges between client and server. Another common use case is single-page applications (SPAs). These applications rely on seamless interactions between the frontend and backend, and Node.js allows developers to use JavaScript across the entire stack.

The V8 Javascript engine compiles JavaScript into machine code, ensuring fast execution, making speed one of the primary advantages of Node. The speed of a platform is crucial to creating an enjoyable user experience. No one enjoys a slow program. Additionally, Node can handle large volumes of simultaneous connections efficiently. Arguably the most important advantage is scalability. Node.js is designed to scale horizontally, allowing applications to handle increasing workloads by adding additional resources without significant architectural changes. Developers can use JavaScript on both the client and server sides, reducing context switching and improving productivity. This consistency simplifies debugging and maintenance.

Node is used by major companies like Netflix and PayPal. Netflix is particular uses Node.js to improve application performance, specifically for the server-side rendering of their video streaming platform. Its lightweight nature has helped Netflix handle millions of user requests with reduced startup time and increased efficiency. PayPal made the switch to Node to unify their frontend and backend development. This shift resulted in a significant reduction in development time and improved application response times.

One drawback to this tool is the asynchronous programming model, this model relies heavily on callbacks and promises. While this enhances performance, it can increase the complexity of debugging and code maintenance.

I chose this topic of research because it’s one of the most popular connection tools for frontend and backend development, and for good reason. One other tool that I came across during my research was Deno, a modern runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript, created by Ryan Dahl, the original developer of Node. Unlike Node, Deno is secure out of the box. It runs scripts in a sandboxed environment, requiring explicit permission to access files, networks, or the environment. Additionally, Deno has native TypeScript support and doesn’t require additional package managers.

Blog Post: https://dev.to/mattclark1025/why-node-js-for-web-development-in-2020-2ebc

From the blog CS@Worcester – Computer Science Through a Senior by Winston Luu and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.