Reading List: Web APIs, REST, Linked Data

In response to my recent post on Swagger and REST, I was asked the following on Twitter: @howard_dierking Trying to dig deeper into the philosophy of API specs. Got recommended reading beyond your links? — Aram Zucker-Scharff (@Chronotope) October 11, 2016 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

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

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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.