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Yet More Trouble with REST APIs?
George Reese, writing recently on his and Adrian Cole's experiences on using REST and SOAP APIs for developing Cloud applications, caused quite a stir in the community. What started as hints-and-tips has turned into a debate over whether there are real problems and misunderstandings around developing APIs with REST, irrespective of Cloud?
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The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of REST APIs
A new blog post by George Reese provides a wealth of recommendations on best practices and common pitfalls of REST APIs implementation.
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Differing Opinions: DTOs vs Domain Objects
Since the introduction of NHibernate and WCF, .NET developers have been moving closer and closer to the concept of unified entity-models. The end game here is that the same class can be act as your ORM entity, your WCF DTO, and your model for a MVC, MVP, or MVVM framework. Mark Seemann, author of Dependency Injection in .NET, argues this isn’t necessarily a good thing.
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Is REST Successful in the Enterprise?
Some might prematurely conclude that REST has won based on Programmable Web data: 73% of the APIs are RESTful. But Steve Jones, a SOA practitioner, draws attention that those APIs are used by front-end systems doing data aggregation and not by the majority of enterprise systems, and REST is not yet ready for the enterprise.
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Community Reacts to Deprecated Google APIs
When Google announced that several programmer interfaces have been deprecated from the API Directory, the development community reacted loudly and in force. While some APIs on the list will be deprecated with no shut down date announced, others like the Translate API will be shut down at the end of the year.
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Who Belongs to the 2011 Open APIs Billionaires Club?
The growth of Open APIs both in numbers and volume has surpassed any expectations over the last decade. John Musser from the ProgrammableWeb presented his analysis of the Open APIs State of the Market for 2011.
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How do you measure the RESTful-ness of an application?
With debates on comparing and contrasting REST with WS-* or SOA having died down, the debate moves on to have to measure how RESTful a system may be, or how "mature" it is. One approach that is referred to many times is the Richardson Maturity Model. However, there is disagreement within the community as to whether or not this model is the right approach to use.
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Puppet Labs Releases Faces, Relicenses Puppet Under Apache 2.0
Puppet Labs released a command-line interface & set of APIs last week, called Faces, that allows sysadmins to create or extend subcommands and actions for Puppet. The API is callable from Ruby and includes objects that expose Puppet’s internal subsystem. Sysadmins can access Puppet objects like report to create, display and submit reports, and catalog to compile, save, view and convert catalogs.
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Is there a Write Side to the Web?
Stu Charlton presented this week a keynote at the WWW 2011 workshop for RESTful design trying to answer the question: "Can the write side of the Web scale and become nearly as serendipitous as the read side?"
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Are RESTful Web Services really RESTful APIs?
One of the co-authors of RESTful Web Services, Leonard Richardson, believes that the term "web service" is dying out and is being replaced by "API". He wonders why this is the case, when it started to happen and whether or not this is leading to poorer product implementations.
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A Proposal for an HTTP Digital Signature Protocol and API
Bill Burke, JBoss's Chief Architect and REST Easy Project Lead, published last week a proposal for a Digital Signature Protocol over HTTP. "DSig" is rapidly gaining popularity, more than 10 years after it was designed, due to the emergence of composite applications and the need to establish trusted relationships between their clients and services.
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RPC or REST in the Cloud?
After our recent article reporting William Vambenepe's assertion that the Cloud does not need REST, several people in the blogosphere countered, claiming that he misunderstood or ignored the importance of REST. William has responded to these critics, attempting to show how perhaps they are putting REST above pragmatic realities and that perhaps RPC is still the best approach, at least for now.
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WCF Web APIs
Most developers first use WCF as a way to expose SOAP-based Web Services. But despite the name, Web Services are not really well suited for building web sites. XML and JSON-based REST services are simply a better fit for most projects. Microsoft has recognized this and is working on a project to bring WCF up to date with modern standards.
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Is REST important for Cloud?
In a recent article, William Vambenepe asks whether REST is really necessary in Cloud implementations when Amazon's success with a non-REST API appears to contradict perceived wisdom.
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Implementing Partial Updates In RESTful Services
Alex Scordellis posted an article on how the interaction of a client and a service can be modeled and designed for updating partial resources. It appears that it is easily solved if we model the resources appropriately. Often times just thinking of resources as entities that support CRUD is the problem and modeling resources as “resources” and the services they offer.