REST beyond the obvious API design for ever evolving systems by Oliver Gierke

Most APIs built today are considered REST APIs these days, when in fact they merely exchange data via HTTP and JSON. At the same time, systems almost never act autonomously but rather live alongside others. In that context, being able to evolve an API becomes a crucial aspect in its design and the only knee-jerk, but often problematic reaction usually is: versioning.

The talk takes a step back and looks at the architectural context APIs live in and outlines the drawbacks that result from ignoring crucial parts of REST. It discusses internal VS. external APIs, whether that distinction is useful in the first place, the impact of Domain-Driven Design and how to design and specify APIs and their clients to optimize for evolvability so that changes in an API don’t break clients.

Oliver Gierke From Pivotal Software, Inc.
Oliver Gierke is the lead of the Spring Data project at Pivotal, Java Champion and member of the JPA 2.1 expert group. He has been into developing enterprise applications and open source projects for over 12 years now. His working focus is centered around software architecture, DDD, REST, and persistence technologies. He is regularly speaking at German and international conferences and the author of technology articles as well as the first book on Spring Data.