webAPItyyli

webAPItyyli is a design philosophy and set of conventions for building web APIs. It emphasizes consistency, developer experience, and interoperability across services, aiming to make APIs predictable and easy to consume.

Core principles include resource-oriented design, the use of HTTP methods as semantic actions (GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE), stable and self-descriptive URIs, statelessness, and explicit versioning. Endpoints typically represent nouns as resources and rely on standard HTTP semantics to convey meaning.

URLs should be stable and reasonably shallow, with resource names in plural form. API design favors predictable query parameters for filtering, sorting, and pagination, and favors clear, consistent naming across endpoints. Content negotiation and standardized media types, most commonly JSON, are encouraged to facilitate broad compatibility.

Error handling follows standardized formats and HTTP status codes. Many implementations adopt a problem details structure for machine-readable error information, along with meaningful error messages and traceable identifiers to aid debugging.

Security and reliability considerations include authentication and authorization (often via OAuth 2.0 or token-based schemes), input validation, rate limiting, CORS configuration, and comprehensive logging and monitoring to detect anomalies.

Documentation and tooling are central elements, with OpenAPI or similar specifications used to generate docs, validate requests, and enable client code generation. Clear examples and versioned documentation help developers integrate more efficiently.

Lifecycle management covers deprecation policies, changelogs, and migration paths for breaking changes. Versioning strategies may be documented and applied consistently to minimize disruption for clients.

In practice, webAPItyyli balances RESTful principles with pragmatic constraints, promoting consistency and ease of use while remaining adaptable across languages and platforms. Critics may point to potential fragmentation if versioning and naming drift apart, underscoring the need for governance.