Ken Anderson

I am President & COO of Concordus Applications, Inc. I am passionate about solving real-world business problems using web-based application technology. I specialize in defining business problems and identifying the underlying drivers to build new and innovated solutions.

I am excited to learn of how others are approaching APIs and am open to alternate solutions if they are well-defined and practical. I love to do things better and faster. I also am the first to admit that REST doesn't solve every problem, but for HTTP-based (especially internet-based) communications it is superior in most scenarios. I am currently involved in leveraging existing media types and their supporting meta-media types along with HTTP to expose APIs that are consumable, manageable, and conform to the constraints of REST.

Media type-agnostic REST APIs

There is a strong movement in the REST API community to define machine-readable REST-specific media types. IMHO, we have enough in our basic media types and protocols to build very robust, flexible and machine-readable REST APIs, it's just a matter of putting the best of them together. There are enough standards and patterns around HTTP to accomplish most of the resource meta-data communication while allowing for an array of media types in the representation. There are clear disadvantages to doing it this way, but I feel there the advantages outweigh the disadvantages and in the next few years, the disadvantages will work themselves out. In the mean time, let's just use what we have really really well and push the existing standards and patterns forward instead of trying to create a plethora of new and competing solutions.