REST API Design Rulebook

Appendix A. My First REST API

I designed my first REST API shortly after joining Starwave in June of 1997.

While working as a programmer in the Sports Engineering group, I was tasked with developing a new Java applet for a web page on the NASCAR Online website. The Race Tracker applet was designed to display the status of the lead cars during a live race event. Once loaded in the user’s web browser, the applet needed to continually fetch the current race status data from a server hosted by Starwave. At that time, Java applets could use either a raw socket or HTTP to access data on remote servers. However, if the applet’s requests needed to cross over the Internet, or even just pass through firewalls, HTTP was the only real option.^[51] In other words, the Java applet needed to talk to a Web API.

By the time I joined the company, the foundations for delivering this type of data over the Web had already been established by Starwave’s team of talented software engineers. Leveraging a proprietary, Java 1.1-based, automated, real-time wire feed processing and publishing system known as “Bulldog,” the server side of my task was to create a new web page template that would access and format the race data to be displayed by the applet. For a given live race event, Bulldog pulled in the data from a wire feed, created Java objects based on the data, then published the objects through my new template to constantly update a plain text file hosted on a standard web server.

These text files, each ...