Constructing URLs the easy way
When building client applications that need to connect to a HTTP API, sooner or later you are going to get involved in constructing a URL based on a API Root and some parameters. Often enough when looking at client libraries I see lots of ugly string concatenation and conditional logic to account for empty parameter values and trailing slashes. And there there is the issue of encoding. Several years ago a IETF specification (RFC 6570) was released that described a templating system for URLs and I created a library that implements the specification. Here is how you can use it to make constructing even the most crazy URLs as easy as pie.
Runscope: Notifications from the Traffic Inspector
Runscope provides a way to log HTTP traffic that passes between client and server and it also can also continuously monitor Web API’s to ensure they are functioning correctly. When something goes wrong with the Web API you can be notified immediately. However, out of the box, there isn’t a way to be notified if there a failure appears in the traffic log. However, it can be done, it just requires a little creativity. This blog post shows how.
The Web API business layer anti-pattern
What follows is a description of an architectural pattern that I see many developers discussing that I believe is an anti-pattern. My belief is based on architectural theory and I have no empirical evidence to back it up, so feel free to come to your own conclusions.