DevOps Articles

Respectful REST APIs: ‘Sunset’ and ‘Deprecation’ HTTP Headers

According to Richardson Maturity Model [Reference , a Level 3 REST architecture introduces the discoverability through hypermedia controls in addition to resources and HTTP verbs, thus making the communication between the involved actors more self-documenting. HATEOAS (Hypermedia as the Engine of the Application State) is an architectural component that allows driving application state (resources’ representations) enhanced with hypermedia support.

It is not uncommon for any target of a HTTP request, that is a resource, to no longer satisfy the requirements.

In addition to attributes as id, status and description, a review is described by the following date fields – dateCreated, dateOpened, dateClosed and dateCancelled.

When implementing APIs (in particular REST APIs) the most important aspect is to keep the “promise” to the clients using it, that is to never brake the contract.