A Question on API Design and Documentation

One of the projects that my team owns is the Concur Developer Center. Among other information, it houses the documentation for Concur’s Web APIs. The documentation for the more recent API versions uses Swagger and until recently was generated by reflecting over the .NET API code. There were a bunch of problems that resulted from this approach as I’ll describe in a second. But there’s also some interesting trade-offs about the kind of APIs you get by focusing on service contracts as your primary design artifact.

Posted by Howard Friday, April 22, 2016

On API Gateways

Do you or your company build Web APIs and, if so, do you use an API gateway to broker traffic between your customers and your products? In this post, I want to tell you a little about our experience with this class of products and add a little of my opinion, but if you’re using an API gateway, I want to hear about your experience - the good and the bad.

Posted by Howard Sunday, May 24, 2015

Designing Evolvable Web APIs with ASP.NET is Now Available!

Although it actually became available last week, I hadn’t blogged about it yet, so correcting that oversight here… After over a year of development, what started as an abstract idea has finally come into being. The idea, while abstarct, was not simple by any means - we wanted to write a book that covered not just the internal workings of the ASP.NET Web API framework, but also how to use it to build systems that would be reliable and evolvable over a long period of time.

Posted by Howard Wednesday, March 26, 2014

The Secret to RESTful Services is RESTful Clients

I'm sitting in the airport waiting to head back to Seattle after several great days at RestFest here in Greenville, SC. Many thanks to Mike Amundsen and Benjamin Young for being such gracious hosts. I’m pretty tired at the moment, but I had a couple takeaways that I wanted to get out there – mainly so that if I forget, I have a reference point to return to.

Posted by Howard Monday, September 23, 2013

Versioning RESTful Services v2

See what I just did there?

Posted by Howard Thursday, September 12, 2013

Versioning RESTful Services

I’ve talked about this in various venues and also cover it in my Pluralsight REST Fundamentals course, but the topic of how to version RESTful services has been popping up a bunch recently on some of the ASP.NET Web API discussion lists, and my friend Daniel Roth asked if I could serialize some of that presentation content into a blog post – so here goes.

Posted by Howard Friday, November 9, 2012

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ABOUT ME
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I’m into a bit of everything. Some might say that makes me attention-deficit - I like to think it gives me the ability to see things from more angles. I’m a huge technology enthusiast, and while I've worked for some pretty large tech companies, my interests are pretty broad. The opinions here are mine alone.