The road ahead of us
a timeline by @goto
The versionless APIs challenge
The API management challenge
The challenges ahead of us
The media type fragmentation
The vocabulary fragmentation challenge
The verb taxonomy challenge
The discovery of APIs challenge
Hello World, from the other side
"You can't understand exactly what's going on, because a resource can be anything at all. A GET request sent to a 'blog post' resource looks like a GET request sent to a 'stock symbol' resource. Those two requests have identical protocol semantics, but different application semantics.
We can't meet the semantic challenge just by using HTTP correctly, because the HTTP protocol doesn't define any application semantics.
We need a language with a vocabulary that can describe the variety of RESTful and hybrid services. A document written in this language could script a generic web service client, making it act like a custom-written wrapper. The SOAP RPC community has united around WSDL as its service description language The REST community has yet to unite around a description language
There is a schema.org microdata item called BlogPost (http://schema.org/BlogPost), which defines semantic descriptors called articleBody and dateCreated. [...]
[...] I took that name from the ActivityStreams standard, where it means 'The act of authoring an object and then publishing it online'. Nobody ever intended schema.org microdata and ActivityStreams verbs to work together, but ALPS lets me combine their application semantics.
The technology trigger
Where we come from