REST: Good Practices for API Design by Jay Kapadnis, Tempus Architect

Poorly Designed REST APIs = FRUSTRATION Working as a Tempus developer and architect, I integrate with plenty of services through REST. Sometimes I find it difficult and time consuming to integrate/consume APIs due to poor design with little to no documentation. This leads to developers (and me) abandoning existing services, and possibly duplicating functionality. To avoid this frustration, the engineering team at Hashmap strives to adhere to specific standards and specifications laid out by existing REST standards. Let’s start our discussion by first understanding what REST is and what is meant by designing REST APIs. What is REST? In 2000, Roy Fielding, one of the principal authors of the HTTP specification, proposed an architectural approach for designing web-services known as Representational State Transfer (REST). Note that, while this article assumes REST implementation with HTTP protocol, REST is not tied to HTTP. REST API’s are implemented for a “resource” which could be....