Boxcars and Cabooses: When one more XHR is too much

RESTful APIs have simplified backend access providing clean URL-based resource representations using standard HTTP methods such as GET and POST. But growth in the number of these APIs can lead to inefficiencies: if an app needs to access many of these resources at once, performance can bog down and user experience can suffer, especially for mobile devices.

'Boxcarring' is the bundling together of multiple HTTP requests into a single request. For example, a client framework might abstract the transport layer and bundle multiple requests into a single call. On the server, a RESTful API must be surfaced to accept a POST to multiple resource representations in one request. This talk will demonstrate both client and server side examples of boxcar requests.