.. evolving a design paradigm for hypertext based web service API

Welcome to meshcaline.org!

This blog contains a series of articles around meshcaline, a design paradigm for hypertext based web service API. Although the ideas of the meshcaline design are appropriate for many classes of API, it creates most value for API that are directly called from end-user devices (browser, mobile app) and that enable end-user facing business process implementations

REST in Piece

Everybody claims to have REST API theses days. Is this correct? And is REST really the right design paradigm for APIs? Analyzing Roy Fielding's rules for REST APIs raises many concerns for the applicability of REST (as defined by the inventor) for public service API offerings. ...more

Basic meshcaline

What are the fundamental concepts and design paradigms of meshcaline and how does it implement hypertext? An introduction for getting started with meshcaline and a must read that sets the scene for most of the other posts. ...more

Why Hypertext API?

Despite the success of the hypertext concept in the browsealbe web, in the programmable web of service API, hypertext is only rarely used. Read how API users, API developers and API business benefit from a hypertext based service API. ...more

Individual resources in a meshcaline API represent steps that guide an end-user through a business process. As such they are by default temporary resources. The simple permalink pattern enables API users to keep references to steps from one business process and start new business processes from there in subsequent sessions. ...more

Paginateable Collections

Collections of objects with potentially large number of items risk that the size of resource representation grows beyond a reasonable limit. To avoid that risk meshcaline recommends a standard representation pattern for paginateable collections. ...more

API Evolution & Compatibility

Now that we have the basic ingredients to design the API for our product, let's analyze what we can do to iteratively evolve our product while at the same time provide a predictable and reliable service to our clients. ...more

Consumer Driven Response Types

By combining ideas of consumer driven contracts and response filtering meshcaline allows you to better understand how your clients use your API and with that enable you to control experimental features and to manage the introduction of incompatible changes ...more