September 2013
Intermediate to advanced
406 pages
10h 35m
English
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Chapter 11. HTTP for APIs
Think of the World Wide Web (and of any other RESTful API) as a technology stack. URLs are on the bottom; they identify resources. The HTTP protocol sits on top of those resources, providing read access to their representations and write access to the underlying resource state. Hypermedia sits on top of HTTP, describing the protocol semantics of one particular website or API.
Figure 11-1. The technology stack that forms the World Wide Web
The bottom layer answers the question “Where is the resource?” The middle layer answers the question “How do I communicate with the resource?” The top layer answers the question “What next?”
So far, this book has focused on the top layer of the stack—“What next?” That’s because the top layer is the tricky one. Most of today’s APIs use URLs and HTTP correctly, but don’t even bother with hypermedia.
In this chapter, I take a break from hypermedia, and go down a level to explain the advanced protocol semantics of HTTP. I don’t want to explain the HTTP protocol in detail; for that, I recommend HTTP: The Definitive Guide, by David Gourley and Brian Totty (O’Reilly). I’ll focus on features of HTTP that are especially useful in APIs, and features that new API developers may not be aware of.
The New HTTP/1.1 Specification
Throughout this book I’ve used “RFC 2616” as a shorthand for the HTTP 1.1 specification. But Roy Fielding (of Fielding ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.