Microsoft REST API Guidelines

I’m a big believer in establishing standards for your REST APIs. I like this one from Microsoft but there are others. What I like about this particular guideline is the structural organization and its brevity. The introductory paragraph provides the reasoning and justification behind REST even when there are language specific SDKs made available.

Developers access most Microsoft Cloud Platform resources via RESTful HTTP interfaces. Although each service typically provides language-specific frameworks to wrap their APIs, all of their operations eventually boil down to REST operations over HTTP. Microsoft must support a wide range of clients and services and cannot rely on rich frameworks being available for every development environment. Thus a goal of these guidelines is to ensure Microsoft REST APIs can be easily and consistently consumed by any client with basic HTTP support.

One thing that would be nice to have is a standard for filtering, paging, etc., on the URL as query parameters. These get defined differently by every REST service architect out there. Or so it seems. A good jumping off point for some research and thought.

And I want to thank my friend Pablo for sending me the link to this.