Here’s a thought that wouldn’t fit into a tweet and will serve the purpose of breaking my blogging dry spell. With all the attention that microservices is currently receiving I regularly hear people talking about service discovery. When trying to co-ordinate multiple different services working together, it is critical to be able to dynamically configure […]
The last year has been been a very interesting one. In April 2014, I announced that I was joining Runscope as a developer advocate. This will be my 50th blog post since that one. I’ve covered all kinds of topics from the intricacies of HTTP to API design guidelines, tricks for using ASP.NET Web API, reviews of APIs, and summaries of some of the conferences that I […]
The site apisjson.org defines a specification for creating a document that declares the existence of an API on the web. This document provides some identification information about the API and links to documentation and to the actual API root URL. It also supports pointing to other resources like API design metadata documents and contact information for maintainers […]
A recent post on the Dropbox developer’s blog post talked about the challenges of constructing URLs due to the challenges of encoding parameters. They proposed the idea of using encoded JSON to embed parameters in URLs. I believe URI Templates offer a much easier and cleaner way to address this issue. This blog posts shows how. I’ve […]
If you spend any time reading about API design or working with APIs you will likely have come across the notion of paging response data. Paging has been used in the HTML web for many years as a method to provide users with a fast response to their searches. I normally spend my time advocating […]
When writing the Web API book, we decided that there was no way we would ever finish if we tried to address every conceivable issue. So we decided to setup a Google Group where readers of the book could ask for clarifications and ask related questions. One question I received a while ago has been sitting on my to-do list […]
Hypermedia is not a new concept, it has been around in various forms since the 1960s. However, in the past seven years there has been a significant resurgence of interest in the concept. This blog post contains my reflections on the past few years, where we currently are and where we might be headed in […]
Yesterday on twitter I made a comment criticizing the practice of putting an API key in a query string parameter. I was surprised by the amount of attention it got and there were a number of responses questioning the significance of my objection. Rather than try and reply in 140 character chunks, I decided a blog post […]
Runscope provides a way to log HTTP traffic that passes between client and server and it also can also continuously monitor Web API’s to ensure they are functioning correctly. When something goes wrong with the Web API you can be notified immediately. However, out of the box, there isn’t a way to be notified if […]