Farms: The ABCs of APIs with Node.js with Greg Rewis

There was a time in the not too distant past, that the only way to retrieve data or talk to back-end services was through languages like PHP, JSP, and .NET — and sharing that data or service with others was a huge pain. Today, with the rise of APIs, it's as easy as a few lines of Javascript and our new best friend, Node.js. In this session, we'll discuss the what's and why's of APIs and look at best practices in RESTful API design. Then we'll take those principals and apply them to building RESTful APIs with Node.js to expose data from any database, as well as mashing up data from 3rd-party APIs. We'll also take a look at an open source project called Swagger that can help simplify the specification and documentation of APIs. Last, but certainly not least, we'll tackle the darker side of APIs and discuss things like rate-limiting, caching and oAuth.