RESTful Web API Patterns and Practices Cookbook

Chapter 8. Closing Remarks

Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.

Matsuo Basho

Now we come to the final stop on this journey—the closing. We’ve covered quite a bit of ground in this book and it’s worth taking a few moments for some final review and reflection.

We started this journey with an introduction (Chapter 1) to the basic ideas behind this book, including exploring the meaning of RESTful web APIs and how hypermedia fits into the picture. We also identified some “Shared Principles for Scalable Services on the Web” to help guide us in selecting and defining the recipes for this book.

I also included some background (Chapter 2) on some of the key technologies and design concepts that drive the web and provide inspiration for the recipes listed here. Hopefully, this historical detour provided some valuable context for the kinds of design and implementations that animate the recipes here.

Of course, the bulk of the book is in Part II, where all the recipes are found.

Finally, I’ve included some pointers to additional material outside the pages of this book that might be helpful as well as a few parting thoughts as you take the content of this book to the next step.

Applying These Recipes

The recipes in this book cover a wide field, including design (Chapter 3), clients (Chapter 4), services (Chapter 5), data (Chapter 6), and workflow (Chapter 7). While they are all laid out in a similar way, some recipes are definitely more challenging ...