REST

Principles

1. An important principle for (RESTful) API design and usage is Postel's Law, aka the Robustness Principle (RFC 1122): “Be liberal in what you accept, be conservative in what you send.”
2. REST APIs must be hypertext-driven
3. Resource-Oriented Architecture (ROA) Representational State Transfer, or REST
4. SOAP, WSDL, and the WS-* stack = Big web services. Big Web Services don’t expose resources. The Web is based on URIs and links, but a typical Big Web Service exposes one URI and zero links.
5. HATEOAS hypermedia-as-the-engine-of-application-state

Books

• Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures, Roy Thomas Fielding, 2000, also html

• Richardson Maturity Model, steps toward the glory of REST, Martin Fowler, 2010

• Restful Web Services, Leonard Richardson & Sam Ruby, 2007, source code, alternative

• REST in Practice: Hypermedia and Systems Architecture, Webber, Parastatidis, Robinson, 2010 (google book)

• RESTful Service Best Practices/Recommendations for Creating Web Services, alternative

• REST in Practice, The slides for the REST tutorial that Ian Robinson and Jim Webber gave at QCON

Links

• Zalando API design principles
• Thoughts on RESTful API Design, Geert Jansen, 2012
• The Atom Publishing Protocol (RFC text)
• Registry of link relations

COURSES

• Web API Design by Wildermuth slides, course link
• Implementing an API in ASP.NET Web API by Shawn Wildermuth on Pluralsight

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