New Sun labs Technical Report TR-153
A New Technical Report from Sun Labs
April 24, 2006 -Many of today's Web sites are opening up access to the information they provide and manage using APIs built on simple HTTP interactions. These APIs expand the
potential use of such Web sites beyond browser-based interactions and support
the creation of composite applications (or `mash-ups' in Web 2.0 parlance) that
merge data from one or more sites in useful and interesting ways.
Typically, these APIs are described using a combination of some sort of schema
that defines the contents of the HTTP messages exchanged along with prose
documentation that describes the Web endpoints available, the HTTP methods they
support, and the message contents that should be included in requests and
expected in responses. Often, site owners provide libraries for a variety of
programming languages that can be used to interact with the site from an
application. Whilst this style of documentation is fine for human consumption,
it doesn't promote automatic tooling for working with such sites and it requires
site owners to invest effort in developing and supporting APIs for their site in
a variety of popular programming languages.
This TR describes a new XML-based language that can be used to describe Web site
APIs in a concise and machine process-able format. Use of this language
promotes more precise description of Web site APIs and (with the availability of
suitable tools) frees site owners from the effort of developing programming
language APIs for their sites.
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