The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of REST APIs

George Reese wrote an article to summarize his experiences using various SOAP and REST cloud computing APIs. His tips include:

Good: Support JSON and XML, prefer REST over SOAP, provide meaningful error messages and solid API documentation.
Bad: Avoid OAuth and HTTP authentication for system-to-system interactions, add throttling thoughtfully and carefully, avoid chatty APIs that require many calls.
Ugly: Don’t return HTML in your response body and understand how to return HTTP error codes.

For the full article, see:

• http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2011/06/the-good-the-bad-the-ugly-of-rest-apis.html