REST x Restful

RPC vs REST is not in the URL

In Phil Sturgeon’s article Understanding REST and RPC for HTTP APIs, he makes the assertion that the following URL is not technically RESTful.POST /trips/123/start I have made a habit of countering these assertions of “non-restfulness” with the following question:   Can you point to the REST constraint that is violated and the negative system effects due […]

Adam Ralph open source

There Is Almost Nothing to See Here

I just read Adam Ralph‘s post Blog == Weblog and I was inspired.  I started blogging 10 years ago because I wanted an outlet for my thoughts.  I didn’t take it particularly seriously as you would see if you dig back to the early days.  [ed note: which would be easier if my blog host actually provided an […]

API Discovery

Distributed Web API discovery

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 […]

Three Body Problem

Solving Dropbox’s URL Problems

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 […]

Sad Cloud hates APIs

Are You Or Your Customers Leaking Your API Keys?

Several months ago I wrote a post called Where, oh where, does the API key go?  I encouraged API providers to allow consumers to put the API Key in the Authorization header to help avoid accidental disclosure of keys via things like web server logs.  I recently bumped into a way that anyone can harvest hundreds […]

Meerkat Query String

Don’t Design A Query String You Will One Day Regret

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 […]

API Producer Auth Token

Where, oh where, does the API key go?

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 […]

Measuring URLs

Constructing URLs the easy way

When building client applications that need to connect to a HTTP API, sooner or later you are going to get involved in constructing a URL based on a API Root and some parameters.  Often enough when looking at client libraries I see lots of ugly string concatenation and conditional logic to account for empty parameter […]

HTTP Hole

HTTP in depth

Over the past few months I have written a number of posts relating to HTTP that have attempted to clarify some of the lesser understood areas of the HTTP specification and provide some practical guidance. Posts that are complete Posts that are on my backlog Feedback If there are posts in the backlog that you would like […]

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