I have recently had to work with a few REST APIs that exhibited some poor design choices that I had previously assumed would be obvious. Since they may not be obvious to everyone, I wanted to highlight them. Idempotent operations When an operation is idempotent that means that an end state will be identical regardless of how many times the operation is executed. If the end state is dependent on the number of times an operation is executed, then it is not idempotent. Why is this important? REST interfaces should assume unreliable networks......
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In the first article in this series, I sketched out some of the basic design ideas for the wordpress plugin licensing system. The next step is to come up with some more concrete details about how the application will work, what information it will manage and what the interfaces will look like when accessing it. I really like using the UML as I flesh out a design. In particular I find the class diagram and activity diagram useful. I frequently make use of stereotypes to extend the meaning of my classes. I’m not......
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