Introduction to REST and Hypermedia

This session held by Asbjørn Ulsberg at PayEx and Nordic APIs event "Secure, flexible and modern APIs for Payments" event in Oslo, May 10th.

Description:
If you’ve ever had these questions:
- What can I do to make the URL most RESTful?
- How do I best describe the URLs and operations of my API in the documentation?
- Should I put the version number of the API into the URL or an HTTP header
- How do I model CRUD on top of HTTP?
- How can I expose my objects over HTTP?
- How can I give enough information to the client so it knows what actions it can perform next?
- How come SOAP had this cool WSDL that allowed me to autogenerate a strongly typed client proxy while REST is a only stringly typed mess?

…then this talk will show you that there has existed a technology for decades that makes all of these questions invalid. The technology is called Hypermedia and this talk will demystify it and explore it in detail.

This talk is for developers dabbling in REST, but who aren’t yet invited to Roy Fielding’s thanksgiving dinner. It will go through the history of REST and how it relates to RPC-style APIs before delving down into the concepts of hypertext and hypermedia, how to implement them in your API and last, but not least; Why!

[writes_rite]

Superb thanks, must add though, you kind of missed the opportunity to crack a great coffee joke, asking to switch a coffee pot on for a fresh brew and receiving a valid 418 error! As defined in rfc2324.