HTTP APIs

Resources

• 2000 Roy Fielding: Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures
• 2008 Roy Fielding: REST APIs must be hypertext-driven
• 2012 Joshua Bloch: How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters
• 2017 Reflections on the REST architectural style and “principled design of the modern web architecture”
• 2018 Ole Begemann: Roy Fielding’s REST dissertation
• 2020 Sinclair Target: Roy Fielding’s Misappropriated REST Dissertation
• 2021 JJ Geewax: API Design Patterns (book)
• 2023 Alex Xu: ByteByteGo: Design effective and safe APIs
• 2023 Joshua Stein: Advice for Operating a Public-Facing API
• Google: API Improvement Proposals

Misc

• Backends For Frontends
• Splitting Your Data & Application APIs
• Don’t Build A General Purpose API To Power Your Own Front End
• json-mask
• Webhooks
• Collection+JSON - Hypermedia Type
• Wikipedia: HAL
• HAL
• HYDRA
• JSON-RPC
• JSON-LD
• json:api
• IANA Media Types
• Let’s Encrypt
• certbot

Pretty Good HTTP API

• Resources
  • /accounts
• HTTP methods
  • GET, HEAD, POST, PUT, DELETE
• Content type
  • application/json
  • application/atom+xml
• Response context
  • Allow, Location, Retry-After, Server
• Status codes
• Hypermedia controls
  • json:api
• Versioning
• Idempotency
• Collection queries
  • Open Data Protocol (OData) collection queries
    • $filter
• OpenAPI spec
• Cools URIs don’t change