[normalfaults]

Are there some go to standards for API design that are followed?

[iaskwhy]

I use the following sources as standards:

- Vinay Sahni's Best Practices for Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API: http://www.vinaysahni.com/best-practices-for-a-pragmatic-res...

- HN discussion on Vinay's post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5819231

- Twitter's Error Codes & Responses: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/error-codes-responses

[johns]

If I can throw my own in: http://john-sheehan.com/blog/dont-build-the-best-rest-api-bu...

[normalfaults]

Thanks these are great!

[Kerrick]

http://jsonapi.org/ is an emerging standard.

http://dev.billysbilling.com/blog/How-to-make-your-API-bette... is a great blog post on API design.

[steveklabnik]

Coauthor of JSON API here, expect to hear lots of neat stuff soon. ;)

[icedog]

Apigee's free ebook is pretty nice. http://pages.apigee.com/web-api-design-ebook.html

[johns]

A new site was just launched to help with this: apicommons.org

My general advice is if it's internal, build what feels right to your team. If it's external, research the APIs you like or are popular (Twilio, Stripe, etc.) and don't be clever.

[grosskur]

"Designing REST + JSON APIs" by Les Hazlewood is a good starting point:

http://www.stormpath.com/blog/designing-rest-json-apis