Relational APIs with Node.js Tastypie and RethinkDB

2016 Aug12
O

ne of the more tricky and debated topics in API circles is how to handle relational data. How deep into your data tree should it go, how to accept it from the client and how much to return to the client. One could choose to treat each resource as a silo and force the client to individually create each object and piece all of the relations together. However, that is not a great user experience. It also leads to a very large number of requests and data transfer, which has been a blemish on the idea of a REST API for a while. The emergence of modern mobile devices which limited bandwidth and performance profiles need a more streamlined

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filed under:  api tastypie hapi rethinkdb node

Throttling Endpoints With Node-Tastypie & Hapijs

2015 Aug01
W

hen you decide to open up parts of your API to the public, you will need to prepare for bad citizens, or consumers that may abuse your API. One way to safe guard against this might be throttling certain endpoints restricting them to a certain number of request per second.

Throttle ['Thraudl] -n --noun., -v --verb

  1. a device controlling the flow
  2. to choke or suffocate in any way.

Tastypie's base resource has hooks for easily implementing throttling behaviors. The default implementations are mostly for testing and debugging be provide the just such a behavior, allowing you to define a number of requests allowed during a given time frame. Setting up is very easy, and looks something like this:

Define

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filed under:  tastypie REST hapi node.js

File Uploads With Node Tastypie & Hapi

2015 Jul24
D

ealing with files and handling uploads is an ugly reality in web applications. It can be even more unpleasant if you application is driven by REST APIs. In days passed, it often came down to flash uploaders talking outside the api and someone having to link multiple data sets together. I was always partial to the fantastic FancyUploader Library. Fortunately, things have gotten better. Node, and Hapi make dealing with incoming files much easier. More over, Tastypie & Hapi make this exceptionally easy to do this in a single Api Endpoint. To illustrate this we are going to build up a small Api to store and save some binary data.

To accomplish this, we need to do 4 things:

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filed under:  api hapi upload rethinkdb node.js

REST APIs with Node Tastypie - Part 3: Custom Routes

2015 Jul21
W

e have been taking a look at how to use Tastypie to easily create robust, feature rich REST APIs. Our focus has been on CRUD operations, mainly because they are the ones that ship with tastypie. However, we are not restricted to CRUD with tastypie. You can define any number of endpoints to do whatever you want. To create a custom set of endpoints there are three basic things you need to do:

  • Define a route
  • Define a handler
  • Define Method Access

Last time we wrote a very simple resource that allowed use to just return simple objects. We are going to continue with that example by adding some custom routes to it. If you are joining in late,

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filed under:  tastypie REST hapi node

REST APIs with Node Tastypie - Part 2

2015 Jun25
L

ast time we took a look at setting up a pretty full featured REST api centered around Mongoose. However, sometimes simple is better. Maybe you don't want and/or need all of the extra things that the MongoResource in Tastypie provides. Sometimes you just want to get something, anything working and dump out some data. We don't need paging, caching, filtering, validation, etc. Luckily, Tastypie gives you a dead simple way to do this by simply defining the methods you want to support. Resource methods are defined as <HTTPVERB>_<ACTION>. So a dumb crud resource would look like this:

The Simple Resource

'use strict'
const {Resource} = require('tastypie')

const Simple = Resource.extend({
  get_list: function(
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filed under:  tastypie REST hapi node