---
year: 2015
month: 2
day: 5
title: Developing Useful APIs for the Web
description: "Internal seminar on developing useful and effective web APIs"
layout: post
---

<p>Yesterday, I gave a talk about my experiences with developing and using RESTful APIs, with the goal of providing tips for structuring such interfaces so that they work in a useful and sensible way.</p>

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<p>I went back to first principles, with overviews of basic HTTP messages as part of the request-response cycle and using sensible status codes in HTTP responses. I discussed the benefits of 'collection-oriented' endpoint URLs to identify resources that can be accessed and modified and the use of HTTP methods to describe what to do with these resources.</p>
