Although the REST community initially took a stance against metadata for REST APIs, a number of metadata standards have none-the-less emerged over the last couple of years, mainly fueled by the need to document APIs for their consumers.

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As an added benefit, the same metadata is now often used to generate code (both client and server), create test harnesses, production monitors and perform real-time validation of request and response messages (when applicable). All of these provide a foundation for an improved Quality of Service (QoS) that many enterprises require as they adopt REST for their information architectures.

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