Awesome REST

A collaborative list of great resources about RESTful API architecture, development, test, and performance. Feel free to contribute to this on-going list.

Design

• HTTP API design guide extracted from work on the Heroku Platform API
• Best Practices for Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API
• How to design a REST API?: a full guide tackling security, pagination, filtering, versioning, partial answers, CORS, etc.
• Enterprise Integration Using REST by the famous Martin Fowler
• Haters gonna HATEOAS: a clear explanation on what HATEOAS is, and why you should use it.
• How to GET a cup of coffee

Standards

• RAML: a simple and succinct way to describe RESTful API
• JSON API: a standard for building APIs in JSON

Clients

PHP

• Guzzle: HTTP client and framework for consuming RESTful web services
• Buzz: another lightweight HTTP client
• unirest for PHP: Simplified, lightweight HTTP client library

Client-Side JavaScript

• restangular: AngularJS service to handle REST API properly and easily
• restful.js: a JS client for interacting with server-side RESTful resources

Node.js

• restler: REST client library for node.js
• unirest for Node.js: Simplified, lightweight HTTP client library

Ruby

• RESTClient - Simple HTTP and REST client for Ruby, inspired by microframework syntax for specifying actions.
• Spyke - Interact with REST services in an ActiveRecord-like manner.
• excon - Usable, fast, simple Ruby HTTP 1.1. It works great as a general HTTP(s) client and is particularly well suited to usage in API clients.

Go

• gopencils - Small and simple package to easily consume REST APIs.

Servers

Directly On Top Of A RMDB

• postgrest: serve a fully RESTful API directly from an existing PostgreSQL database
• MySQL HTTP plugin: A simple REST-like / CRUD server for any MySQL database

Node.js

• node-restify: a framework specifically meant for REST API
• Sails.js: a Node.js Web framework embedding a command to generate automatically a REST API
• mers: an Express service to expose Mongoose finders as RESTful API
• Baucis: build scalable REST API based on your Mongoose entities
• flatiron/resourceful: an isomorphic Resource engine for JavaScript

PHP

• Microrest: a micro-web application providing a REST API on top of any relational database
• Negotiation - A content negotiation library.
• Drest - A library for exposing Doctrine entities as REST resource endpoints.
• Restler - A lightweight framework to expose PHP methods as RESTful web API.
• HAL - A Hypertext Application Language (HAL) builder library.
• Apigility - An API builder built with Zend Framework 2.
• phprest: specialized REST microframework for PHP
• Hateoas: a PHP library to support implementing representations for HATEOAS REST web services

Symfony2

• REST APIs with Symfony2: the Right Way: a complete guide to build a state-of-the-art REST API with Symfony2 framework
• FOSRestBundle: bundle handling view, routing, error handling, etc. for your REST API
• stanlemon/rest-bundle: build a REST API based on Doctrine entities using conventions over configuration
• lakion/Lionframe: a glu between several community libraries to ease API development
• BazingaHateoasBundle: integrate the Hateoas library into a Symfony2 application
• Symfony REST Edition: start with a Symfony2 application with all REST-friendly bundles pre-configured
• NgAdminGeneratorBundle: boostrap ng-admin configuration based on stanlemon/rest-bundle

Python

• django-tastypie - Creating delicious APIs for Django apps.
• flask-restful - An extension for Flask that adds support for quickly building REST APIs.
• flask-restless - A Flask extension for generating ReSTful APIs for database models defined with SQLAlchemy (or Flask-SQLAlchemy).
• sandman - Automated REST APIs for existing database-driven systems.
• restless - Framework agnostic REST framework based on lessons learned from TastyPie.
• savory-pie - REST API building library (django, and others)

Ruby

• Grape - An opinionated micro-framework for creating REST-like APIs in Ruby.

Go

• go-json-rest: a thin layer on top of net/http that helps building RESTufmigl API easily
• sleepy: a RESTful micro-framework written in Go
• restit - A Go micro framework to help writing RESTful API integration test
• go-relax - A framework of pluggable components to build RESTful API's
• go-rest - A small and evil REST framework for Go
• Goat - A minimalistic REST API server in Go
• Resoursea - A REST framework for quickly writing resource based services.
• Zerver - Zerver is a expressive, modular, feature completed RESTful framework.

Testing

Querying

• httpie: a command line HTTP client, far more dev-friendly than curl
• Postman REST Client: a Chrome extension essential to test manually REST API
• resty: little command line REST client that you can use in pipelines (bash or zsh)
• jq: command line JSON processor, to use in combination with a command-line HTTP client like cURL

Mocking

• FakeRest: patch XMLHttpRequest to fake a REST API client-side
• json-server: serve a REST API from fixture files using quick prototyping

Public REST APIs To Use In Tests

• Marvel Comics API: query characters, stories, events about Marvel superheroes
• JSON Placeholder: a free online REST service that you can use whenever you need some fake data.

Documentation

• Swagger: Documentation/querying web interface for REST APIs

SaaS tools

• Runscope: Automated API Monitoring & Testing
• import.io Magic: Create a REST API from any website in one click
• Apiary: Collaborative design, instant API mock, generated documentation, integrated code samples, debugging and automated testing.

Miscellaneous

• ng-admin: add an AngularJS admin GUI to any RESTful API