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

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

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

Take advantage of JavaScript’s power to build robust web-scale or enterprise applications that are easy to extend and maintain. By applying the design patterns outlined in this practical book, experienced JavaScript developers will learn how to write flexible and resilient code that’s easier—yes, easier—to work with as your code base grows. JavaScript may be the most essential web programming language, but in the real world, JavaScript applications often break when you make changes. With this book, author Eric Elliott shows you how to add client- and server-side features to a large JavaScript application without negatively affecting the rest of your code. Examine the anatomy of a large-scale JavaScript application Build modern web apps with the capabilities of desktop applications Learn best practices for code organization, modularity, and reuse Separate your application into different layers of responsibility Build efficient, self-describing hypermedia APIs with Node.js Test, integrate, and deploy software updates in rapid cycles Control resource access with user authentication and authorization Expand your application’s reach through internationalization

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

"Every developer working with the Web needs to read this book." -- David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Rails framework "RESTful Web Services finally provides a practical roadmap for constructing services that embrace the Web, instead of trying to route around it." -- Adam Trachtenberg, PHP author and EBay Web Services Evangelist You've built web sites that can be used by humans. But can you also build web sites that are usable by machines? That's where the future lies, and that's what RESTful Web Services shows you how to do. The World Wide Web is the most popular distributed application in history, and Web services and mashups have turned it into a powerful distributed computing platform. But today's web service technologies have lost sight of the simplicity that made the Web successful. They don't work like the Web, and they're missing out on its advantages. This book puts the "Web" back into web services. It shows how you can connect to the programmable web with the technologies you already use every day. The key is REST, the architectural style that drives the Web. This book: Emphasizes the power of basic Web technologies -- the HTTP application protocol, the URI naming standard, and the XML markup language Introduces the Resource-Oriented Architecture (ROA), a common-sense set of rules for designing RESTful web services Shows how a RESTful design is simpler, more versatile, and more scalable than a design based on Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) Includes real-world examples of RESTful web services, like Amazon's Simple Storage Service and the Atom Publishing Protocol Discusses web service clients for popular programming languages Shows how to implement RESTful services in three popular frameworks -- Ruby on Rails, Restlet (for Java), and Django (for Python) Focuses on practical issues: how to design and implement RESTful web services and clients This is the first book that applies the REST design philosophy to real web services. It sets down the best practices you need to make your design a success, and the techniques you need to turn your design into working code. You can harness the power of the Web for programmable applications: you just have to work with the Web instead of against it. This book shows you how.

For your next project on GitHub, take advantage of the service’s powerful API to meet your unique development requirements. This practical guide shows you how to build your own software tools for customizing the GitHub workflow. Each hands-on chapter is a compelling story that walks you through the tradeoffs and considerations for building applications on top of various GitHub technologies. If you’re an experienced programmer familiar with GitHub, you’ll learn how to build tools with the GitHub API and related open source technologies such as Jekyll (site builder), Hubot (NodeJS chat robot), and Gollum (wiki). Build a simple Ruby server with Gist API command-line tools and Ruby’s "Octokit" API client Use the Gollum command-line tool to build an image management application Build a GUI tool to search GitHub with Python Document interactions between third-party tools and your code Use Jekyll to create a fully-featured blog from material in your GitHub repository Create an Android mobile application that reads and writes information into a Jekyll repository Host an entire single-page JavaScript application on GitHub Use Hubot to automate pull request reviews