This document lists various useful patterns for API design. We encourage API developers to consider the following patterns as a guide while designing APIs for services.
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.
The words "REST" and "RESTful" MUST be written as presented here, representing the acronym as all upper-case letters. This is also true of "JSON," "XML," and other acronyms.