Web service best practices

January 28, 2008 9:19 AM

Where can I find more information on web service best practices?

We're hiring some people to write some web services for us in asp.net. I need to put together a best practices document for them but I've only consumed web services, never written them. Can anyone point me in the right direction so I can learn more about what makes a good web service vs a bad one?

posted by TungstenChef to computers & internet (5 comments total)

There's not a lot of standardization yet around the vague concept of "web services." Flickr's API handles all the more common request and response formats, so you might want to look at that to decide which formats you prefer. Flickr's also a good example of well-documented web services, which is key no matter which formats you use.
posted by scottreynen at 11:29 AM on January 28

RESTful Web Services should be a good start.
posted by rjt at 1:23 PM on January 28

Two primary principles should be REST and KISS.
posted by rhizome at 1:50 PM on January 28

Seconding RESTful Web Services. Even if you use a more RPC-like model, it's still useful to think about best practices from a REST point of view, and try to preserve as many advantages of REST as you can. The Ruby/Richardson book is opinionated, but it's nonetheless a great introduction to web service architecture.
posted by mbrubeck at 3:49 PM on January 28

Please do your API's users a favor and read RESTful Web Services. Make sure the people you hire read it too.

Disclaimer: I contributed about 10 pages to that book.
posted by jacobian at 4:31 PM on January 28