If you think in a generic way about all well implemented RESTful APIs you will find a pattern that can be easily described and stored in metadata. Most RESTful API is just a combination of the following elements: Resource location (URL) HTTP method Header information Input parameters (required and optional) Content type Output parameters Business logic description Today I would like to discuss an interesting problem that I came across recently. Imagine for a second that you need to implement a RESTful API client which uses a combination of metadata which describes API and a user input in order to make a HTTP calls. In such a scenario you will quickly realize that for a subset of API calls you will need to develop a custom classes in order to have them later serialized (to JSON or XML) in runtime so that you can send it via POST or PUT requests. This rises a question. Do I really need to implement N - 1 classes that represent all types that some API(s) e...
Damian Zapart, Principal Engineering Manager @ Microsoft - official blog.