Applying Twitter's API "Best Practices" In A ColdFusion Application

I really enjoyed the presentation Ben. The best part for me though was the way you handled the error handling. Loved the way you surround the processing segment with a CFTRY and then throw your own error at varying points to handle the correct return code to the caller. Very clever and clean way of building the API. I'll certainly be looking to use a similar system in future.

Though that mic needed to be thrown out of the window. ;)

I think you should keep this presentation . . . improve it. This is a topic I could stand to learn more about, especially since there are good APIs out there such as Flickr ready to be taken advantage of.

Hey Ben,

This was indeed a great presentation my man, well done, really changed my perception on RESTful services, something which I've always shyed away from.

One thing that did cross my mind later that day when I was reflecting on this is that I've seen some funky behaviour with IIS7. I think that by default IIS7 will throw it's own custom error pages whenever you set the response code to anything other than 200.

So, in your case where you're returning XML or JSON formated error messages and adding a status code for 40x of 50x errors then IIS7 will throw it's own HTML content rather than your XML error messages.

I've not had time to look at this and see if that's exactly the case but my gut instinct, and experience of trying to throw friendly exception messages that still carry 50x status codes tells me that IIS7's default behaviour may cause some issues.

Any thoughts or ideas?

Robert

Excellent write up. I've been doing a lot of work with writing API's recently. Both RESTful and SOAP. We should chat sometime about an API framework / best practices for ColdFusion developers.