In many areas, we see the use of shared conventions to foster productivity. Docker resp. OCI images start to take over the delivery and installation of server software. Kubernetes seems to be achieving the same for the orchestration of software. Graph databases are leading the way when it comes to modeling and evolving complex, interrelated data sets. In stark contrast, REST development seems to be heading in the opposite direction. Instead of relying on shared conventions, people specify their personal flavor with OpenApi. Developers have to fiddle with path mappings and status codes; maybe with one or the other library offering some short-cuts for common patterns. In contrast, highly efficient, asynchronous frameworks get built that scale to thousands of concurrent requests that only a few of us actually need. This article outlines a number of different possibilities to address these issues, move Java REST development to a higher level, and gain more productivity, consistency, and simplicity.
Ideas to achieve such goals are well established. For example, the Richardson Maturity Model specifies four levels of maturity for REST services. Services are supposed to make use of HTTP, have a resource-oriented architecture, perform proper mapping to URLs, and introduce links to facilitate the discovery of the API. Ideally, REST libraries would come with native support for such patterns. Such libraries may make use of three main building blocks in one way or the other: https://goo.gl/4vDMCt #DataIntegration #ML
