I have been working on a Cloud Dataflow project that parses incoming App Engine logs to generate status statistics such as numer of errors in the last 10 minutes. The incoming data is a JSON representation of a LogEntry object. A LogEntry object is represented in Java as a LogEntry class. The task I found myself in was converting the JSON representation of a LogEntry into the Java object for downstream processing. ...
The typical update cycle for an API resource is to (1) GET the representation, (2) modify it and (3) PUT back the entire representation. This can waste bandwidth and processing time for large resources. An alternative is to use the HTTP PATCH extension method to only send the differences between two resources. HTTP PATCH applies a set of changes to the document referenced by the HTTP request. ...
In recent years REST has been at the forefront of modern API design. This has led to APIs with manageable URLs that respect the HTTP verbs (GET, POST, PUT and the rest), producing an intuitive model for client developers. Unfortunately, there are two problems that REST doesn’t solve alone. ...