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REST

Designing Payloads for Long Term Stability

Designing Payloads for Long Term Stability

Payload design is one of the most interesting, powerful and often overlooked aspects of API architecture. While URLs define how resources are addressed, payloads define how information is exchanged. Poor payload design can lead to performance issues, excessive network traffic, and fragile client implementations. Designing good payloads requires balancing competing

Precision in Communication: The Role of HTTP Status Codes

Precision in Communication: The Role of HTTP Status Codes

HTTP status codes are one of the most powerful communication tools available in an API. They provide an immediate, standardized way to convey the outcome of a request without requiring the client to inspect the payload. Despite this, many APIs misuse or underuse status codes, reducing them to generic success

Structuring RESTful URLs

Structuring RESTful URLs

If you haven't been following my blog and just stumbled upon this post, this is the 6th article on my series about designing REST APIs, you can read the rest here. If, on the other hand you've been following and you like what you've

Understanding Core REST principles

Understanding Core REST principles

When people talk about REST, they often focus on surface level characteristics: URLs that look clean, JSON payloads, and HTTP verbs used “correctly”. While these elements are visible and important, they are not what makes an API RESTful and it’s not what REST is all about. REST is defined

Naming REST API Resources the Right Way

Naming REST API Resources the Right Way

The two, often cited, most difficult things in Computer Science are cache invalidation and naming things. I'm afraid both are unavoidable when building web applications and APIs are also part of web applications. In this post we will focus on the later as resource names are not internal

Identifying Resources from Requirements

Identifying Resources from Requirements

Resources do not come from databases, frameworks, or other existing ways of modeling data. They come from requirements. More specifically, they come from understanding what users want to do and what concepts they talk about when describing their needs and identifying the different roles. The best way, in my experience,

Introducing REST++

Introducing REST++

Abstract This document proposes REST++, an evolution of the Representational State Transfer architectural style, designed to address practical shortcomings observed in large-scale API implementations. REST++ preserves the general philosophy of resource-oriented communication while relaxing several constraints that have proven difficult to apply consistently in modern distributed high-performing