EST Apis seem to be taking over the world as of late, and Node has been the platform of choice for building them. However, when you take a look at some of the tooling for building robust REST APIs in the node community, the options are bleak at best. When you take a look at all of the properties that would make an API RESTful, it is easy to see that it is rather complex.

REST

There are a few fundamental properties that make apis RESTful - they should be a Scaleable, Stateless, Cacheable, fit into a Layered System which is apart of a Client / Server model that provides a Uniform Interface. In the confines of a Restful HTTP

aching is often times the first line of defense against poor performing applications and very quickly becomes a critical and complex part of various parts of the stack. One of the more frustrating aspects of caching, is that there are so many very capable solutions available - Redis, memcached, memory etc. Even some databases or plain old `files` can be used to cache data in certain circumstances. Each of them having different strengths, weaknesses, uses cases and different APIs.

Cache ['kash] -n, noun; -v, verb

a component that stores data so future requests for that data can be served faster; the data stored in a cache might be the results of an earlier computation, or the duplicates of data

o consider myself to be an equal opportunity coder. I like investigating different tools built in different languages to solve different types of problems. Recently at work I had the opportunity to play around with [elasticsearch](http://www.elasticsearch.org). Elasticsearch brings the whole distributed / non relational data craze to the world of search. It is actually a rather impressive piece of tech. If you are at all interested in search as a problem, I recommend you give it a look. In any event, I need to get some data into the search engine to play around with. Where could I get a good deal of data without doing the heavy lifting myself? Twitter! Sure the twitter activity stream.