Tag: API

JSON API? No … HAL!

Wait, what?  That’s exactly what I said when I read this blog post.  I am still making my way through the JSON API specification.  And now it seems I might be wasting my time, as I should be learning HAL.

Whereas JSON API is almost like an “ORM over HTTP”, HAL does a lot less for you though, so it’s not really an apples-to-apples type of comparison.

HAL really is just a document format for a hypermedia API, like HTML is for hypertext. It doesn’t tell you how to express your domain model, and doesn’t really tell you how to use HAL to submit changes.

Sometime I think that I should just stop learning.  What’s the point?  By the time you learn a thing or two, it’s already obsolete and somebody somewhere has created something better, or wiser, or cheaper.

Meh…

OpenAPI Specification

OpenAPI Specification v2.0 – formerly known as Swagger RESTful API Documentation Specification.

Swagger™ is a project used to describe and document RESTful APIs.

The Swagger specification defines a set of files required to describe such an API. These files can then be used by the Swagger-UI project to display the API and Swagger-Codegen to generate clients in various languages. Additional utilities can also take advantage of the resulting files, such as testing tools.

Google vs. Oracle : API vs. implementation

Slashdot is running the story about the Google vs. Oracle court case.  I thought this bit was rather brilliant:

Schwartz’s second attempt at the breakfast menu analogy went much better, as he explained that although two different restaurants could have hamburgers on the menu, the actual hamburgers themselves were different — the terms on the menu were an API, and the hamburgers were implementations.”

Best Practices for Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API

An API is a user interface for developers. Put the effort in to ensure it’s not just functional but pleasant to use.

Vinay Sahni has a rather lengthy, detailed, and well-rounded post on how to design a good RESTful API.  It covers pretty much everything from URL structures and parameters, request methods, to error handling, documentation, and coding style.