The popularity of REST in recent years has led to tremendous growth in almost-RESTful APIs that don’t include many of the architecture’s benefits. With this practical guide, you’ll learn what it takes to design usable REST APIs that evolve over time. By focusing on solutions that cross a variety of domains, this book shows you how to create powerful and secure applications, using the tools designed for the world’s most successful distributed computing system: the World Wide Web.

You’ll explore the concepts behind REST, learn different strategies for creating hypermedia-based APIs, and then put everything together with a step-by-step guide to designing a RESTful Web API.

• Examine API design strategies, including the collection pattern and pure hypermedia
• Understand how hypermedia ties representations together into a coherent API
• Discover how XMDP and ALPS profile formats can help you meet the Web API "semantic challenge"
• Learn close to two-dozen standardized hypermedia data formats
• Apply best practices for using HTTP in API implementations
• Create Web APIs with the JSON-LD standard and other the Linked Data approaches
• Understand the CoAP protocol for using REST in embedded systems

Microservices can have a positive impact on your enterprise—just ask Amazon and Netflix—but you can fall into many traps if you don’t approach them in the right way. This practical guide covers the entire microservices landscape, including the principles, technologies, and methodologies of this unique, modular style of system building. You’ll learn about the experiences of organizations around the globe that have successfully adopted microservices.

In three parts, this book explains how these services work and what it means to build an application the Microservices Way. You’ll explore a design-based approach to microservice architecture with guidance for implementing various elements. And you’ll get a set of recipes and practices for meeting practical, organizational, and cultural challenges to microservice adoption.

• Learn how microservices can help you drive business objectives
• Examine the principles, practices, and culture that define microservice architectures
• Explore a model for creating complex systems and a design process for building a microservice architecture
• Learn the fundamental design concepts for individual microservices
• Delve into the operational elements of a microservices architecture, including containers and service discovery
• Discover how to handle the challenges of introducing microservice architecture in your organization

A lot of work is required to release an API, but the effort doesn’t always pay off. Overplanning before an API matures is a wasted investment, while underplanning can lead to disaster. This practical guide provides maturity models for individual APIs and multi-API landscapes to help you invest the right human and company resources for the right maturity level at the right time.

How do you balance the desire for agility and speed with the need for robust and scalable operations? Four experts from the API Academy show software architects, program directors, and product owners how to maximize the value of their APIs by managing them as products through a continuous life cycle.

• Learn which API decisions you need to govern and how and where to do so
• Design, deploy, and manage APIs using an API-as-a-product (AaaP) approach
• Examine ten pillars that form the foundation of API product work
• Learn how the continuous improvement model governs changes throughout an API’s lifetime
• Explore the five stages of a complete API product life cycle
• Delve into team roles needed to design, build, and maintain your APIs
• Learn how to manage your API landscape—the set of APIs published by your organization

Powerful web-based REST and hypermedia-style APIs are becoming more common every day, but instead of applying the same techniques and patterns to hypermedia clients, many developers rely on custom client code. With this practical guide, you’ll learn how to move from one-off implementations to general-purpose client apps that are stable, flexible, and reusable.

Author Mike Amundsen provides extensive background, easy-to-follow examples, illustrative dialogues, and clear recommendations for building effective hypermedia-based client applications. Along the way, you’ll learn how to harness many of the basic principles that underpin the Web.

• Convert HTML-only web apps into a JSON API service
• Overcome the challenges of maintaining plain JSON-style client apps
• Decouple the output format from the internal object model with the representor pattern
• Explore client apps built with HAL—Hypertext Application Language
• Tackle reusable clients with the Request, Parse, Wait Loop (RPW) pattern
• Learn the pros and cons of building client apps with the Siren content type
• Deal with API versioning by adopting a change-over-time aesthetic
• Compare how JSON, HAL, Siren, and Collection+JSON clients handle the Objects/Addresses/Actions Challenge
• Craft a single client application that can consume multiple services

With this concise book, you’ll learn the art of building hypermedia APIs that don’t simply run on the Web, but that actually exist in the Web. You’ll start with the general principles and technologies behind this architectural approach, and then dive hands-on into three fully-functional API examples.

Too many APIs rely on concepts rooted in desktop and local area network patterns that don’t scale well—costly solutions that are difficult to maintain over time. This book shows system architects and web developers how to design and implement human- and machine-readable web services that remain stable and flexible as they scale.

• Learn the H-Factors for representing application metadata across all media types and formats
• Understand the four basic design elements for authoring hypermedia types
• Convert a simple read-only XML-based media type into a successful API design
• Examine the challenges and advantages of designing a hypermedia type with JSON
• Use HTML5’s rich set of hypermedia controls in the API design process
• Learn the details of documenting, publishing, and registering media type designs and link-relation types