I’m tasked to design a new API for our infrastructure. Some of the things I’d like to do is:
- implement oauth for authentication
- good xml-based structure, adapting ATOM, GEO-RSS and other xml schema standards where applicable.
- JSON output
Some of the things I’ve been thinking about is applying REST. In practice I find it’s not as easy to grasp as a more ‘method, argument, result’-RPC model.
Especially since there’s no simple CRUD-model, but about 250 distinct operations it doesn’t make a lot of sense for me.
Some of the things I’m wondering, is how I should create a good mapping between JSON-format and namespaced XML format. If this doesn’t work intuitively, I’ll manually map all the data-types.
So basically, I’m wondering what you think, and if you have any examples of API’s that were complex, but easy to use.
In case you were wondering, SOAP is out of the question.
The british newspaper the Guardian has an excellent (new) API. It’s large, has a number of client libraries, and has a very good API explorer – which functions as a split pane in your browser with a live console for playing around with the API.