Apiary @RESTfest
By Mark W. Foster (fosrias, mark@apiary.io) on 01 Oct 2014
Once again, this year’s installment of RESTfest fanned the flames of API designers, developers, consumers and evangelists alike. As an unconference where everyone presents on anything, you never really know what you are in store for and the fun is to see completely disparate people, from all spectrums of expertise, explore the space of REST and APIs.
A Hypermedia API “bake off” kicked off the weekend. Our friend @lukestokes whipped up an API Blueprint on the fly for our team. Unfortunately, technical difficulties (mine) hampered our glorious plans. Such is life on a Hackday.
No surprise that Hypermedia was a hot topic. What was surprising were the recurring themes about tooling and design. Instead of focusing on protocols and media-types, a common thread was designing and implementing Hypermedia APIs as semantically rich state machines. A number of us at Apiary have been exploring new approaches to API design and client and server-side tooling based on state-machines for a while, so it was encouraging to see others progress in the area.
Simple, human-friendly API design platforms were another hot topic. From straightforward ways to semantically describe resources and data structures, integrated API validation and exploring/visualizing APIs in ways that are friendly to non-technical business stakeholders were the order of the day. Many were in search of such tooling and, a few like ourselves at Apiary, are actively working on it.
All in all, great people, great discussions and a plethora of cool, practical ideas around the future of APIs. If you have a chance to attend next year, I highly recommend it.
Feel free to comment or ask any questions.