REST

Background

A Client has E-commerce Application consisting of services aimed at specific domains of business functionality it serves. One of these services is responsible for accepting the order, authenticating it and forwarding it for further processing in terms of inventory checks, payment and so on. For Authentication, this service sends SMS to Customer’s Mobile number (and e-mail id) and customer is supposed to confirm this order placement by means of entering Code received in it. This code is valid for a short duration.

Introduction

One of the design considerations stressed upon by Jeffrey richter about APIs (Read more here) is that “API is expected to be stable over long period of time”. Recently,for a .NET based project, we decided to upgrade some of the ASMX (legacy SOAP based approach) based APIs and were immediately reminded by Customer(s) to avoid any kind of impact on existing users.

This means that upgrade must be done keeping in mind,

Background

Recently, i went through excellent video series on Designing & Versioning HTTP_REST APIs presented by Jeffrey Richter. It is available here. In the past, i had read Jeff’s books on CLR and found his writing to be very clear and understandable. So is my experience with this Video Series. Below is summary of learnings from this Video Series. I do not claim that every aspect is covered here so please do check out the videos.