The popularity of REST in recent years has led to tremendous growth in almost-RESTful APIs that don€t include many of the architecture€s benefits. With this practical guide, you€ll learn what it takes to design usable REST APIs that evolve over time. By focusing on solutions that cross a variety of domains, this book shows you how to create powerful and secure applications, using the tools designed for the world€s most successful distributed computing system: the World Wide Web.

You€ll explore the concepts behind REST, learn different strategies for creating hypermedia-based APIs, and then put everything together with a step-by-step guide to designing a RESTful Web API.

• Examine API design strategies, including the collection pattern and pure hypermedia
• Understand how hypermedia ties representations together into a coherent API
• Discover how XMDP and ALPS profile formats can help you meet the Web API "semantic challenge"
• Learn close to two-dozen standardized hypermedia data formats
• Apply best practices for using HTTP in API implementations
• Create Web APIs with the JSON-LD standard and other the Linked Data approaches
• Understand the CoAP protocol for using REST in embedded systems