Your Web API is Not the WWW

One of the most common techniques used by the REST faithful to shut down any questioning of the faith is to appeal to the WWW. This post attempts to establish the fallacy of such an appeal.

Posted by Howard Tuesday, June 26, 2018

An API by Any Other Version

Version 3 of my thoughts on API versioning. Spoiler: It's all just about names.

Posted by Howard Tuesday, May 16, 2017

A Linked Data Overview for Web API Developers

For a while now, I’ve held the belief that the biggest reason people get the whole “REST" thing wrong is because they are looking at Roy Fielding’s doctoral dissertation – the paper that coins the term “REST” - as a prescription for how to design APIs. There are 2 things wrong here that I think explain the current state of the API world when it comes to REST. First, is the idea that the terms and descriptions in the paper can be exclusively applied to the server.

Posted by Howard Saturday, October 15, 2016

Reading List: Web APIs, REST, Linked Data

In response to my recent post on Swagger and REST, I was asked the following on Twitter: Rather than a Twitter stream of references, I thought I would just consolidate my resource list here. Note that for the most part, this list is limited to books. While I’ve put a few canonical Web documents on here, it’s nearly impossible to go back through and chronicle every blog post and article that has shaped my thinking.

Posted by Howard Monday, October 10, 2016

Swagger Ain't REST - is that OK?

If you’ve spent much time with me, you’ve undoubtedly heard me ramble on at length about linked data. And in those conversations, you’ve likely heard me say something to the effect of “linked data is REST”. However, I haven’t really spent much time talking about REST by itself - especially considering the amount of importance heaped on it by proponents of the “API Economy”. I’ve focused my attentions elsewhere primarily because as an architectural style, REST isn’t something that a team can just go and implement.

Posted by Howard Friday, October 7, 2016

There is No REST API

I’ve spent some time talking with my teams recently about REST from the perspective of an API, and also how APIs built through the lens of technologies like Swagger go against some of the most important principles of REST. As I’ve reflected more over conversations, there is one even more fundamental thing that tends to get lost in the conversation. And that is that REST doesn’t describe APIs. REST describes the architectural characteristics of an entire system, which includes all of the different components of that system.

Posted by Howard Thursday, September 15, 2016

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

SEARCH
FEATURED TAGS
api-versioning apis architecture career devops home-office javascript linked-data management microservices personal rdf reading research rest swagger time-management workflow
ABOUT ME
avatar

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.