Target Audience: Beginners / Novice

Summary A long time ago, we had simpler lives with our monolithic apps talking to relational databases. SQL supported having myriad conditions with the WHERE clause and conditions. As time progressed, every application became a webapp and we started developing HTTP services talking JSON, consumed by a variety of client applications such as mobile clients, browser apps etc. So, some of the filtering that we were doing via SQL WHERE clauses now needed a way to be represented via HTTP query parameters. This blog post tries to explain the use of HTTP Query Parameters for newbie programmers, via some examples. This is NOT a post on how to cleanly define/structure your REST APIs. The aim is to just give an introduction to HTTP Query Parameters.

Action Let us build an ebooks online store. For each book in our database, let us have the following data:

BookID - String - Uniquely identifies a book

Title - String

Authors - String Array

Content - String - Base64 …