Written by Phil Sturgeon
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on Dec. 18, 2017
Enough people have asked me about the article REST is the new SOAP that I felt it justifies a write up. Before I get started, I want to be clear that I hold no grudge against the author, and if any frustration leaks out in my writing I'd like to apologize in advance. The entire article is full of…
Written by Phil Sturgeon
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on Aug. 25, 2017
Last month today OpenAPI v3.0 was released, and not only is there a lot of cool stuff, but it unblocks some akward situations with vendor prefixes and other lacking features. I was hoping the tooling would be hot on its tails. Progress is being made in all of the repositories I've got my eyes on,…
Written by Phil Sturgeon
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on Aug. 13, 2017
With endpoint-based APIs (REST, RESTish, SOAP, RPC, AJAX-ish junk, etc.) you get to choose if you want increased likelihood of network cache hits, or the ability to slim down the response. The two goals are mutually exclusive. Slimming responses can be achieved with concepts like sparse fieldsets…
Written by Phil Sturgeon
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on Jul. 20, 2017
Documentation is a nice thing to have, but it is often treated as optional or superfluous, especially in teams where the clients and servers are managed by the same people. Here the code is considered the contract, so why define it again in documentation? Certainly, with all the tooling around, API…
Written by Phil Sturgeon
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on Jun. 19, 2017
Representing state is a complex thing. At my last two jobs, it's been very common for APIs to be treated like "databases over HTTP". The fields are sent up and down from the server to multiple mobile/web apps, and there's not too much else going on. Over time, we noticed this specific problem happe…
Written by Phil Sturgeon
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on Apr. 17, 2017
After writing about how GraphQL and REST differ in various regards, and taking a closer look at caching in particular, I wanted to write about how you can get some of the benefits of GraphQL into an existing endpoint-based API. It's finally live, and over on the Runscope blog. Normally I'd post thi…