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 […]

Yak API Keys

Share Your Code, Not Your API Keys

Part of my role at Runscope involves me writing OSS libraries or sample projects to share with other developers.  I also regularly use 3rd party APIs in the process.  This requires the use of API keys and other private data that I’d rather not share.  Unfortunately it is all too easy to leave a key in a […]

Alphabet API Car

API Design Notes: Smart Paging

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 […]

Monks Debating Hypermedia

Hypermedia, past, present and future

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 […]

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 […]

Canary Inspecting Traffic

Runscope: Notifications from the Traffic Inspector

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 […]

Shared Business Logic Archetecture

The Web API business layer anti-pattern

What follows is a description of an architectural pattern that I see many developers discussing that I believe is an anti-pattern.  My belief is based on architectural theory and I have no empirical evidence to back it up, so feel free to come to your own conclusions. The proposed architecture looks like this, I’ve never […]

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