index.md

layout	title	show_masthead
page	A standard for building APIs in JSON.	true

If you've ever argued with your team about the way your JSON responses should be formatted, JSON API is your anti-bikeshedding weapon.

By following shared conventions, you can increase productivity, take advantage of generalized tooling, and focus on what matters: your application.

Clients built around JSON API are able to take advantage of its features around efficiently caching responses, sometimes eliminating network requests entirely.

Here's an example response from JSON API:

{
  "links": {
    "posts.author": {
      "href": "http://example.com/people/{posts.author}",
      "type": "people"
    },
    "posts.comments": {
      "href": "http://example.com/comments/{posts.comments}",
      "type": "comments"
    }
  },
  "posts": [{
    "id": "1",
    "title": "Rails is Omakase",
    "links": {
      "author": "9",
      "comments": [ "5", "12", "17", "20" ]
    }
  }]
}

The top-level "links" section is optional, and without it the response probably looks very close to a response from your already-existing API.

JSON API covers creating and updating resources as well, not just responses.

{% include status.md %}

MIME Types

JSON API has been properly registered with the IANA. Its media type designation is application/vnd.api+json.

Format documentation

To get started with JSON API, check out our documentation

Update history

• 2013-05-03: Initial release of the draft.
• 2013-07-22: Media type registration completed with the IANA.

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