If you were at @defrag or @apistrat in November, you know that I am working to better understand the often complex world of APIs using the Subway map concept. My goal is to better understand the overall API life cycle, as well as the life cycle of individual APIs, and how I can articulate, strategize, and execute on it all, using a subway experience.
It made me happy to see the folks over at Restlet playing with the same concept (we didn't coordinate on it honestly), to help articulate HTTP status codes, which is a very important topic for the space, and we need more education tools, and stories around it. Using the subway map analogy, Restlet provides a representation of the five areas of status codes, providing a simple way to explore them, and find a description of each individual status code.
The subway map they provide is currently a static map, but this is one of the biggest potential areas in using this analogy for me, is that with the right JavaScript + JSON voodoo, you can make it real-time, and interactive. This is something I'm working on to bring the entire lifecycle to the forefront this month.
Nice work Restlet team, I enjoy these efforts by providers to help educate the space, especially when they do it in creative and fun ways like this.
Disclosure: Restlet is an API Evangelist partner.
