guess I must mean gRPC. I dunno, I’m old enough that I saw generation after generation of RPC frameworks fail miserably; brittle, requiring lots of configuration, and failing to deliver the anticipated performance wins. Smells like making RESTful APIs more tightly coupled, to me, and it’s hard to see that as a win. But I could be wrong. ¶
way to decompose complicated problems, and its extreme simplicity and resilience will mean that if you want to design networked apps, you’re still going to have to learn that way of thinking about things.
already fa- miliar with: a website. Chapter 2, A Simple API This chapter translates the lessons of the Web to a programmable API with identical functionality to the website discussed in Chapter 1. xviii | Introduction Chapter 3, Resources and Representations Resources are the fundamental concept underlying HTTP, and representations are the fundamental concept underlying REST. This chapter explains how they’re re- lated. Chapter 4, Hypermedia Hypermedia is the missing ingredient that ties representations together into a co- herent API. This chapter shows what hypermedia is capable of, mostly using a hypermedia data format you’re already familiar with: HTML. The next four chapters describe different strategies for designing a hypermedia API: Chapter 5, Domain-Specific Designs The obvious strategy is to design a completely new standard that deals with your exact problem. I use the Maze+XML standard as an example. Chapter 6, The Collection Pattern One pattern in particular—the collection pattern—shows up over and over again in API design. In this chapter, I show off two different standards that capture this pattern: Collection+JSON and AtomPub. Chapter 7, Pure-Hypermedia Designs When the collection pattern doesn’t fit your requirements, you can convey any representation you want using a general-purpose hypermedia format. This chapter shows how it works using three general hypermedia formats (HTML, HAL, and Siren) as examples. This chapter also introduces HTML microformats and micro- data, which lead in to the next chapter. Chapter 8, Profiles A profile fills in the gaps between a data format (which can be used by many different APIs) and a specific API implementation. The profile format I recommend is ALPS, but I also cover XMDP and JSON-LD. In this chapter, my advice begins to outstrip the state of the art at the time this book was written. I had to develop the ALPS format for this book, because nothing else would do the job. If you’re already familiar with hypermedia-based designs, you might be able to skip up to Chapter 8, but I don’t think you should skip past it. Chapters 9 through 13 cover practical topics like choosing the right hypermedia format and getting the most out of the HTTP protocol. Chapter 9, The Design Procedure
= Stateless = (the server doesn’t care what state the client is in.) " Self-Descriptive Messages HTML document you receive doesn’t just give you the immediate information you asked for. The document also helps you answer the question of what to do next.
Wide Web to its early competitors, you’ll see the difference. " Gopher, FTP, Archie, Veronica, Jughead, WAIS, and Prospero Once the Web took over, it became a lot more difficult to justify creating a new appli- cation protocol.