dretblog

Building Static Sites: How and Who

Building static Web sites is appealing for a variety of reasons: The model can support a rather large range of use cases, allows to use simple tools and easy deployment, and makes it trivial for everybody to work on branches... Read more →

The Three Drivers of the API Economy

Explaining that APIs are *a big thing* nowadays rarely is necessary anymore. Both major scenarios of *APIs as a way to interface with partners or the public*, and *APIs as a way to structure your IT internally for greater agility*... Read more →

Linksets: Beyond Inline Hypermedia Controls

*Hypermedia* is based on the assumption that representations contain a mix of data and control information (think HTML's embedded links as the canonical example). Usually, that control information is mixed into or alongside the data, meaning that the producer of... Read more →

API Usability Matters: UX and CX is like DX and ...

Being faster at designing and delivering new experiences and products has become one of the main rallying cries of "digital transformation". As a modern organization, you have to stop struggling with the IT side of your goals (or create artificial... Read more →

API Maps: Hypermedia API Design

*API First* is the approach of consciously designing APIs instead of treating them as by-products of implementation work. It is the same mindset that is popular for human-facing Web sites: Design these consciously, and they will be much more likely... Read more →

Whypermedia: Why use Hypermedia?

The question of whether hypermedia (sometimes referred to as the REST hypermedia constraint) is a worthwhile foundation for API design is debated quite often. One of the frequent counter-arguments is that designers and developers are not that familiar with hypermedia,... Read more →

JSON Schema: Why and How

Prompted by a thread on the IETF's JSON WG mailing list, I find myself wondering (again) why the current JSON landscape does not have an established schema language, and what it would take to change that. There is a long-expired... Read more →

Patterns for Robust Extensibility

Extensibility is key to creating APIs that not only work initially, but that also can evolve in terms of being appropriated for different contexts, and/or evolving over time. Extensibility is not the only pattern that robust and evolvable APIs should... Read more →

AtomPatch, or: Composing Media Types

media types are one of the foundations of web architecture: media types allow clients to understand the rules of engagement, so that interpretation of state, as well as subsequent interactions, can be driven by that shared understanding. ideally, new services... Read more →

WoT 2011 Deadline Extended

due to popular demand, we have decided to extend the submission deadline for the Second International Workshop on the Web of Things (WoT 2011). The new dates are shown below in the excerpt from the original Call for Papers for... Read more →