Amundsen M. - Building Hypermedia APIs with HTML5 and Node [2012, PDF, ENG]

Amundsen M.- Building Hypermedia APIs with HTML5 and Node

Год: 2012
Автор: Mike Amundsen
Издательство: O’Reilly
ISBN: 978-1-449-30657-1
Язык: Английский
Формат: PDF
Качество: Изначально компьютерное (eBook)
Количество страниц: 242
Описание: This book’s primary focus is on designing hypermedia APIs. That may seem a bit
strange to some readers. There are many books on programming languages, data stor-
age systems, web frameworks, etc. This is not one of those books. Instead, this book
covers the nature of the messages passed between client and server, and how to improve
the content and value of those messages. I, personally, find this to be an exciting and
fascinating area.
As of this writing anecdotal trends seem to indicate an ever-increasing reliance on APIs
in web development. In general, this is a good thing. It means more and more developers
are catching on to the notion that the World Wide Web is a great place to share not
only data, but also services, a goal of those who championed the web in its early days.
However, I believe that this explosion of web APIs may lead us down a troublesome
path. In my experience over the last few years, I have seen too many examples of im-
plementations that rely on concepts of APIs rooted in desktop and local area network
patterns that will not scale well at the WWW level, solutions still exhibiting brittleness
that can lead to costly and frustrating maintenance issues as time goes by. In short, I
don’t see enough hypermedia in API offerings for the web.
This book is an attempt to improve the chances that new APIs added to the WWW
will be easier to use and maintain over time, and that they will take their cue from those
who were responsible for the discovery of the value of hypermedia linking; the codifi-
cation of the HTTP protocol; and the implementation of HTML, Atom/AtomPub, and
other native hypermedia formats that still drive the growth of the web today.