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 […]
At a recent conference, I found myself once again in a conversation about the meaning of the term REST. I’ve had this conversation so many times, that I tend to forget that not everyone has heard my take on the subject. The conversation ended with a “you should blog that…”. Most developers are aware that […]
Last week was RESTfest week. RESTfest is an unusual little conference that happens in Greenville, South Carolina every September. This is the fifth year it has run and this is my fourth time attending, and I learn a ton every time. What makes RESTFest unique is its “everyone speaks” policy. Although there is a keynote, a whole […]
In the recent update of the HTTP specification, the details of conditional requests have been split out and given their whole own specification. Most developers I talk to are familiar with the idea of 304 Not Modified response code, but whenever we start to dig deeper everyone, myself included, are missing pieces of the puzzle. This article is one […]
Uber recently announced the availability of a public API. I decided to take it for a spin and provide some commentary. The quick version is that it is a fairly standard HTTP API and that is both a good thing and a bad thing. You can find the official documentation for the Uber API on their […]
We are currently seeing a significant amount of discussion about building hypermedia APIs. However, the server side only plays part of the role in a hypermedia driven system. To take full advantage of the benefits of hypermedia, the client must allow the server to take the lead and drive the state of the client. As […]
Several years ago when I was beginning to work on a large hyper media driven client, I recognized frequently recurring patterns and decided that I could raise the level of abstraction from an HTTP client to a hypermedia client. It took about a year to realize that it was not as good an idea as […]
In Web API 2.1 a new mechanism was introduced for returning HTTP messages that appeared to be a cross between HttpResponseMessage and the ActionResult mechanism from ASP.NET MVC. At first I wasn’t a fan of it at all. It appeared to add little new value and just provide yet another alternative that would a be a source of confusion. […]
This opinion has been stewing for a couple of years now, but following an excellent conversation I had with Ted Young the other evening at the API Craft San Francisco event, I think it is time to have more discussion around this subject. A little bit of history I have been a big supporter of the HAL media […]