HTTPcentered

HTTPcentered is a design philosophy and set of practices for building software systems in which HTTP is the primary protocol for accessing and orchestrating resources. While not a formal standard, HTTPcentered promotes architectural choices that align with the semantics and constraints of HTTP, emphasizing interoperability, scalability, and discoverability across components.

Key principles include treating services as resource repositories identified by stable URIs, using standard HTTP methods for operations (GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE), and maintaining stateless interactions so each request contains enough context to be processed independently. Responses should leverage standard status codes, semantics, and meaningful content formats to enable client-driven workflows.

A typical HTTPcentered architecture favors resource-oriented design, content negotiation, and hypermedia as a means to guide clients. It often employs REST-like patterns, layered systems, caching via Cache-Control and ETag headers, and clear versioning strategies. Security is commonly addressed through transport-layer security, token-based authentication, and least-privilege access.

Practical tooling includes API description formats, such as OpenAPI, and data representations like JSON or HAL. Observability, idempotency guarantees for safe methods, and robust error reporting with standardized problem details are emphasized to improve client integration and operator operations.

Benefits of HTTPcentered approaches include improved interoperability, easier caching and scaling, and clearer service boundaries. Trade-offs can involve higher latency or over-fetching in some designs, so practitioners balance resource granularity, payload size, and compliant use of HTTP semantics within the system context.