RESTful Web API Patterns and Practices Cookbook

Many organizations today orchestrate and maintain apps that rely on other people’s services. Software designers, developers, and architects in those companies often work to coordinate and maintain apps based on existing microservices, including third-party services that run outside their ecosystem. This cookbook provides proven recipes to help you get those many disparate parts to work together in your network.

Author Mike Amundsen provides step-by-step solutions for finding, connecting, and maintaining applications designed and built by people outside the organization. Whether you’re working on human-centric mobile apps or creating high-powered machine-to-machine solutions, this guide shows you the rules, routines, commands, and protocols—the glue—that integrates individual microservices so they can function together in a safe, scalable, and reliable way.

• Design and build individual microservices that can successfully interact on the open web
• Increase interoperability by designing services that share a common understanding
• Build client applications that can adapt to evolving services without breaking
• Create resilient and reliable microservices that support peer-to-peer interactions on the web
• Use web-based service registries to support runtime “find-and-bind” operations that manage external dependencies in real time
• Implement stable workflows to accomplish complex, multiservice tasks consistently

Table of Contents

Part I. Understanding RESTful Hypermedia

Chapter 1. Introducing RESTful Web APls

Chapter 2. Thinking and Designing in Hypermedia

Part II. Hypermedia Recipe Catalog

Chapter 3. Hypermedia Design

Chapter 4. Hypermedia Clients

Chapter 5. Hypermedia Services

Chapter 6. Distributed Data

Chapter 7. Hypermedia Workflow

Chapter 8. Closing Remarks

Appendix A. Guiding Principles of RESTful Web APls

Appendix B. Additional Reading

Appendix C. Related Standards

Appendix D. Using the HyperCLI

About the Author

An internationally known author and speaker, Mike Amundsen travels the world consulting and talking about network architecture, Web development, and the intersection of technology and society. He works with companies large and small to help them capitalize on the opportunities APIs, Microservices, and Digital Transformation present for both consumers and the enterprise.

Amundsen has authored numerous books and papers. He contributed to the O’Reilly Media book, “Continuous API Management” (2018). His “RESTful Web Clients”, was published by O’Reilly in February 2017 and he co-authored “Microservice Architecture” (June 2016). Amundsen’s 2013 collaboration with Leonard Richardson “RESTful Web APIs” and his 2011 book, “Building Hypermedia APIs with HTML5 and Node”, are common references for building adaptable Web applications. His latest book — “Design and Build Great APIs” — for Pragmatic Publishing was published in May 2020.