Introduction

The REST API took inspiration from several successful REST APIs: The Query API is loosely modeled after Facebook's Query Language

The Search API is merely a CloudSearch query url-encoded. See CloudSearch documentation for search syntax

See Service API Design for more information regarding the rationale and design details.

Encoding

The primary request and response encoding for the service is JSON. Here's a handy tool to make a blob of JSON more readable: http://jsonformatter.curiousconcept.com/

In responses from the service, dates are serialized as long integers expressing epoch time - the number of seconds elapsed since midnight Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) of January 1, 1970, not counting leap seconds. Here's a handy tool to convert from epoch time to human readable dates: http://www.epochconverter.com/

In requests to the service, dates can be serialized either as long integers expressing epoch time or human readable dates in RFC 3339 format such as '2011-01-31' or '2011-01-31T22:00:00'

Security

In production all services are HTTPS. For requests requiring authentication, users pass a special header sessionToken with each request to the service.