RESTful Web APIs

The popularity of REST in recent years has led to tremendous growth in almost-RESTful APIs that don’t include many of the architecture’s benefits. With this practical guide, you’ll learn what it takes to design usable REST APIs that evolve over time. By focusing on solutions that cross a variety of domains, this book shows you how to create powerful and secure applications, using the tools designed for the world’s most successful distributed computing system: the World Wide Web.

You’ll explore the concepts behind REST, learn different strategies for creating hypermedia-based APIs, and then put everything together with a step-by-step guide to designing a RESTful Web API.

• Examine API design strategies, including the collection pattern and pure hypermedia
• Understand how hypermedia ties representations together into a coherent API
• Discover how XMDP and ALPS profile formats can help you meet the Web API “semantic challenge”
• Learn close to two-dozen standardized hypermedia data formats
• Apply best practices for using HTTP in API implementations
• Create Web APIs with the JSON-LD standard and other the Linked Data approaches
• Understand the CoAP protocol for using REST in embedded systems

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Surfing the Web
Chapter 2. A Simple API
Chapter 3. Resources and Representations
Chapter 4. Hypermedia
Chapter 5. Domain-Specific Designs
Chapter 6. The Collection Pattern
Chapter 7. Pure-Hypermedia Designs
Chapter 8. Profiles
Chapter 9. The Design Procedure
Chapter 10. The Hypermedia Zoo
Chapter 11. HTTP for APIs
Chapter 12. Resource Description and Linked Data
Chapter 13. CoAP: REST for Embedded Systems

Appendix A. The Status Codex
Appendix B. The Header Codex
Appendix C. An API Designer’s Guide to the Fielding Dissertation