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The Decorator Pattern
One design pattern that I don’t see being used very often is Decorator. I’m not sure why this pattern isn’t more popular, as it’s quite handy. The Decorator pattern allows one to add functionality to...
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REST Maturity
In 2008, Leonard Richardson published his Maturity Heuristic that classified web services into three levels based on their use of URI, HTTP, and hypermedia. Back then, most web services were stuck at...
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RESTBucks Evolved
The book REST in Practice: Hypermedia and Systems Architecture uses an imaginary StarBucks-like company as its running example. I think this is a great example, since most people are familiar with the...
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HyperRosetta
The Rosetta stone is a rock with the same text inscribed in three different languages. This allowed us to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs. In this post I’ll introduce a similar “stone” for hypermedia...
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Behavior-Driven RESTful APIs
In the RESTBucks example, the authors present a useful state diagram that describes the actions a client can perform against the service. Where does such an application state diagram come from? Well,...
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How To Control Access To REST APIs
Exposing your data or application through a REST API is a wonderful way to reach a wide audience. The downside of a wide audience, however, is that it’s not just the good guys who come looking....
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How To Design a REST API
There is a lot of interest in REST APIs these days. Unfortunately, most APIs I see are not very mature. In this post I’d like to share my approach to designing REST APIs: Understand the problem domain...
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How To Return Error Details From REST APIs
The HTTP protocol uses status codes to return error information. This facility, while extremely useful, is too limited for many use cases. So how do we return more detailed information? There are...
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The State of REST
The S in REST stands for State. Unfortunately, state is an overloaded word. In this post I’ll discuss the two different kinds of state that apply to REST APIs. Applications The first type of state is...
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How To Process Java Annotations
One of the cool new features of Java 8 is the support for lambda expressions. Lambda expressions lean heavily on the FunctionalInterface annotation. In this post, we’ll look at annotations and how to...
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