Designing Hypermedia APIs

At first, the web was used to exchange information stored in static documents; soon, a common interface for generating pages was created. In order to support this massive scale, certain design decisions were made to make it all work. Roy Fielding analyzed these design decisions and synthesized them into “a framework for understanding software architecture through architectural styles, including a consistent set of terminology for describing software architecture.” Alongside his framework, he also provided a description of “REST, a novel architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems.” This better understanding of aspects of Internet architecture has informed our design decisions since that time. HTTP 1.1, for example, introduced some changes to bring HTTP more in line with RESTful design principles.