Preliminary Analysis of REST API Style Guidelines

We studied a collection of 32 publicly published guidelines for designing RESTful Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), each from a different company, to identify similarities and differences to see if there are overall best practices across ten different topics. Our contribution includes providing a list of topics that API authors can reference when creating or evaluating their own guidelines. Additionally, we found that while some guidelines attempt to enforce consistency, simplicity, and intuitiveness in the APIs that use these guidelines, cross-guideline comparisons show a lack of consistency in some of the topics examined, and different interpretations of what is thought to be “simple” and “intuitive.”

• Human-Computer Interaction and Visualization

• Software Systems