A problem I often see with first production versions of HTTP APIs is they are tightly coupled to the client code. This is especially easy to do in web applications where both the client and server source are contained in the same repository.

A few signs in development you should watch out for:

• Display changes on the client cause a change in the API
• API resources that are only a combination of other resources
• Client views and API resources have a one-to-one relationship

These hint that the API may be too specialized to the client. This make other clients harder to develop, and makes changing the current client difficult. Instead, let client development push the API to develop flexibility, instead of assumptions on how it will be used.