title: Is there standard way of making multiple API calls combined into one HTTP request?
body: <p>While designing rest API's I time to time have challenge to deal with batch operations (e.g. delete or update many entities at once) to reduce overhead of many tcp client connections. And in particular situation problem usually solves by adding custom api method for specific operation (e.g. <code>POST /files/batchDelete</code> which accepts <code>ids</code> at request body) which doesn't look pretty from point of view of rest api design principles but do the job.</p>
  
  <p>But for me general solution for the problem still desirable. Recently I found <a href="https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/json_api/v1/how-tos/batch?hl=en" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Google Cloud Storage JSON API batching documentation</a> which for me looks like pretty general solution. I mean similar format may be used for any http api, not just google cloud storage. So my question is - <strong>does anybody know kind of general standard (standard or it's draft, guideline, community effort or so) of making multiple API calls combined into one HTTP request?</strong></p>
  
  <p>I'm aware of capabilities of http/2 which include usage of single tcp connection for http requests but my question is addressed to application level. Which in my opinion still make sense because despite of ability to use http/2 taking that on application level seems like the only way to guarantee that for any client including http/1 which is currently the most used version of http.</p>