Building Blocks Lego

Composing API responses for maximum reuse with ASP.NET Web API

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.  […]

Dog Tags

An HTTP Resource is a lot simpler than you might think

Unfortunately, I still regularly run into articles on the web that misunderstand the concept of an HTTP resource.  Considering it is a core piece of web architecture, having a clear understanding of what it means can make many other pieces of web architectural guidance considerably easier to understand. To try and keep this post as […]

Big Bang

Single purpose media types and reusability

The one great thing about twitter is that you quickly find out what you failed to explain clearly 🙂  My efforts in advocating for single purpose media types failed to clarify that by single purpose, I am not suggesting that these media types should not be re-usable.  Let me try and explain. My realization was triggered by @inadarai ‘s […]

Best Before Date

Single purpose media types and caching

My recent post asking people to refrain from creating more generic hypermedia types sparked some good conversation on twitter between @mamund, @cometaj2, @mogsie, @inadarei and others.  Whilst thinking some more on the potential benefits of single purpose media types versus generic hypermedia types, realized there is a correlation between single purpose media types and representation lifetimes.  I thought it might be worth […]

XSLT JSON

XSLT is easy, even for transforming JSON!

Most developers I talk to will cringe if they hear the acronym XSLT.  I suspect that reaction is derived from some past experience where they have seen some horrendously complex XML/XSLT combination.  There is certainly lots of that around. However, for certain types of document transformations, XSLT can be a very handy tool and with […]

Vanilla Ice Cream

Please, no more generic hypermedia types

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 […]

Kwick-e-Mart

Self-descriptive, isn’t. Don’t assume anything.

With the recent surge of interest in hypermedia APIs I am beginning to see the term “self-descriptive” thrown around quite frequently.  Unfortunately, the meaning of self-descriptive is not exactly self-descriptive, leading to misuse of the term.  Consider the following HTTP requests, Example 1 Example 2: I suspect a fair number of people will be surprised […]

JSON

Returning raw JSON content from ASP.NET Web API

In a previous post I talked about how to send raw JSON to a web API and consume it easily.  This is a non-obvious process because ASP.NET Web API is optimized for sending and receiving arbitrary CLR object that then get serialized by the formatters in the request/response pipeline.  However, sometimes you just want to have more […]

UNICODE

There is Unicode in your URL!

In our Runscope HipChat room a few weeks ago, I was asked about Unicode encoding in URLs.  After a quick sob about why I never get asked the easy questions, I decided it was time to do some investigating.  I had explored this subject in the past whilst trying to get Unicode support working in my URI Templates […]

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