RESTful Web API Patterns and Practices Cookbook

Preface

Welcome to the world of the RESTful Web API Patterns and Practices Cookbook.

That’s quite a moniker—one worth explaining and exploring. And that’s what we’ll be doing in this preface. I will tell you now that I’m going to break the rules a bit and include a substantial amount of pertinent text in the front matter of this book (front matter is all these pages with roman numerals as page numbers). I’ll save the details for the next section (Part I). Let’s first take care of some logistics.

About This Book

The goal of this book is to enable software designers, architects, developers, and maintainers to build service interfaces (APIs) that take advantage of the strengths of the web, while lowering the costs and risks of creating reliable high-level services that hold dependencies on other APIs and services reachable only over the network.

To do that, I’ve gathered a collection of more than 70 recipes and patterns that I’ve learned and used over the several decades I’ve spent helping clients design, build, and deploy successful business services on the open web. I suspect you will be familiar with at least some of the recipes you’ll find here—possibly by other names or in different forms. I also hope that you will find novel approaches to similar problems.

Note

Over the years, I’ve found that the challenges of software design rarely change. The solutions to those problems change frequently based on technology advances and fashion trends. We’ll focus on the challenges in this ...