I've talked, at length, about the challenges of microservice development in previous REST API Notes. If there has been an API trend in 2017, it has been techniques to deal with increasing service complexity. Two of the biggest have been reactive microservices and service meshes. REACTIVE MICROSERVICES Jonas

NEW FRONTIER SAME AS THE OLD FRONTIER Last week I was at the API World conference. In his kickoff to the microservices workshop, Matt McLarty shared the presentation "New Frontiers for Microservices". A PDF of the deck is available on the conference website. What I appreciated about Matt&

This week I am in San Jose for API World 2017. Downtown San Jose, where the event is held, has ghosts for me. In 2006 I attended the first ever Adobe Community Summit right around the corner from the convention center. It was a multi-day event of user group leaders

THE BEST OF RESTFEST The 2017 stateside edition of RESTfest concluded this past week in Greenville, SC. One of the fantastic aspects of the event is emphasis on sharing work with the wider world. This year, like previous years, there was a host of worthwhile things to check out. ERIK

REFLECTIONS ON REST Last week, Roy T. Fielding, originator of the Representational State Transfer style (REST), co-published a major recap of his work. Entitled "Reflections on the REST Architectural Style and 'Principled Design of the Modern Web Architecture'", it is available for download via Google Research.

Hopefully separating the vim from the vinegar that GraphQL represents doesn't become an annual September tradition. Last year, about this time, I recapped the 2016's tempest in a teapot. Fast-forward a year and, other than the barbs being sharper and a couple of notable releases, little

STRIPE AND VERSIONING A few issues ago I discussed Google's approach to API versioning. It was a practical approach to dealing with what any API developer confronts: change in production. Stripe recently published its own thoughts on the topic. Rather than the usual URL-verses-header debate, author Brandur Leach

MICROSERVICES: TAKING STOCK Early in July, Sam Newman had a very interesting post entitled "Microservice Insecurity". Sam explains the challenges with successful microservice adoption, concluding that there actually very valid reasons not to introduce microservices to a project. It might be a surprise coming from the author of

Last week I was in Chicago teaching API design. The weather couldn't have been more perfect; even the night-time lightning show that rolled off the plains and onto my hotel window was reminiscent of childhood summers. Before packing up and flying back to the increasing boil of DC,

This newsletter has a couple of clusters; it is as if folks were conspiring together for great sets of complementary material. We'll start with RESTful API design basics and then do a deeper dive into microservice implementation. REST API BASICS For someone creating an API for the first