Opponents of API versioning using media types often suggest that media type proliferation is a cause for serious concern. The implication is that the more media types that exist, the more different formats intermediates and tools will need to understand in order to be useful. Fortunately, this is just not true. Having lots of media [...]
Threads about how to version hypermedia (or REST) APIs are multitude. I certainly have made my opinion known in the past. That being said, the most common approach being used in the wild is putting a version number in the URI of the resources which are part of the API. For example, http://api.example.com/v1/products/42. That approach [...]
Jean-Jacques Dubray takes issue with my approach of using content negotiation to manage service versioning in HTTP. I actually hesitate to respond to Mr. Dubray because the overall tone of his piece is rather off putting. On the other hand, he raises a couple of interesting questions which I have been really looking for and [...]
In my previous post on this subject I described an approach to versioning the API of a REST/HTTP web service. This approach has significant advantages over the approach that is currently most common (i.e. embedding a version token in the URL). However, it does have some downsides. This post is an attempt to outline those [...]
Managing changes to APIs is hard. That is no surprise to anyone who has ever maintained an API of any sort. Web services, being a special case of API, are susceptible to many of the difficulties around versioning as other types of APIs. For HTTP based REST style web services the combination of resources and [...]
