Shaping REST API responses with advanced query algebra.

Currently, REST APIs give us little control over the structure of data that is to be returned. We can fetch a list of items, for example articles, but we don't have control over embedding nested objects, such as comments, or filtering and ordering results by certain attributes. With standardized query logic passed via URL params, clients are able to shape results according to their needs.

The example query below would result in a list of articles ordered by creation date, whose title contains "REST" with embedded author objects:

GET /articles?title=%REST%&embed=author&order=created_at:desc

This talk will give a proposal of a standardized query algebra, which various famous APIs already partially implement using differing syntaxes and feature subsets.