My advice is: Use standards and don't reinvent the wheel. There are plenty of them... https://jsonapi.org/ https://jsonapi.org/ https://github.com/OAI/OpenAPI

My advice is: Use standards and don't reinvent the wheel. There are plenty of them... https://jsonapi.org/ https://jsonapi.org/ https://github.com/OAI/OpenAPI-Specification https://github.com/OAI/OpenAPI-Specification http://json-schema.org/ http://json-schema.org/ https://graphql.org/learn/ https://graphql.org/learn/ ... And for authentication and authorisation use oauth: https://oauth.net/2/ https://oauth.net/2/ and prevent states and cookies (!) - use tokens and headers instead. There is no "BEST" option in my opinion, but https://api-platform.com/ https://api-platform.com/ is a good place to start for getting things done... and perhaps search for HATEOAS libs in the programming language of your choice.