2012-11-24

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about web APIs, and I’ve come to the following conclusions:

RPC web services are out. Resources and representations are in. API marketing has commandeered the term REST, and the vast majority of today’s APIs fall short of the REST that Roy Fielding defined. Hypermedia is the future, and those of us who want to live in that future have to build it. Not enough of it exists to just use what others have already built.1 Hypermedia API designs will require a larger initial investment in server and client design and implementation, with a benefit of greater forward compatibility — resiliency to change over the long term.

The term REST has been so thoroughly overused that it’s nearly impossible to learn about its future by searching for reading material using REST as a keyword. Thankfully, the community moving Fielding’s ideas forward is using hypermedia to describe their work instead. Once you make the keyword switch, there’s a wealth of information with little accompanying noise drowning out the signal.

I suspect my appetite for reading about hypermedia will give way to building hypermedia while I’m reading Building Hypermedia APIs with HTML5 and Node. If not, the following look like promising further reading:

1 I’m talking about hypermedia for APIs and resilient automated clients. Obviously, hypermedia is well established for web user interfaces.