I found this guide from Apigee’s Brian Mulloy a really clear and decisive guide to designing REST APIs that work for developers (the forgotten customer). In a field typically littered with argument and opinion it’s refreshing to see someone take a stance with clear reasoning and make simple recommendations.

The HN forum around it here of course gently rages in dis/agreement and has some interesting points about possible missing angles such as performance, hateos, but they left me still thinking it was as good a scheme as any to follow. I’m sold!

Given one opportunity, I’d also add standardising the approach to the somewhat deregulated parameter formats according to the URI spec suggestions, as per Dorian Taylor’s similarly sensible sounding scheme. I’ve already implemented that in a CMS REST interface and it worked really well. Why reinvent the wheel?

Pip