Gain insights into designing robust APIs, explore essential tools for design, documentation, testing, and deployment. Delve into ALPS, OpenAPI, Postman, and Heroku for comprehensive API development.

Design and Build Great Web API's by The Pragmatic Programmer-01.png

webapis.tar.gz

Testing APIs

Testing API Exercise

Building API Exercise

Building API Exercise Solution

Securing API Exercise

Securing API Exercise Solution

MockAPI

Account Mock API

Company service Mock API

Challenge-1 Mock API Solution

Postman Mock API

At the start of this course, you’ll be introduced to a handful of important practices and principles for designing and building APIs that are robust, reliable, and resilient. You’ll also acquire skills in a wide range of developer tools, including tools for design, documentation, building, testing, security, and deployment. 

You'll learn the best practices for modeling an APIs lifecycle using Donald Norman’s action lifecycle. Then, you’ll learn how to use the sequence diagram for designing APIs and describing them using ALPS. For sketching an API, you will learn about Gehry's sketches. You will also cover OpenAPI and SwaggerHub for API mocking. Moreover, the usage of DARRT and NodeJS will be covered for building APIs. You'll finish with learning how to use the Postman for testing APIs and then deploy them using Heroku.

By the end of this course, you will have an in-depth understanding of how to make fully functional efficient APIs from its inception to its deployment.

Design and Build Great Web APIs


In this chapter, we covered API-first as a mindset for creating and building APIs. The most important point in the API-first approach is that we should focus on what people want to do with our API. It’s hard to go wrong when we keep in mind both the people using the API and the jobs they need to get done with it.

We also saw how to use the curl command-line utility to make HTTP calls in order to inspect the APIs of other services. In this chapter, we studied three existing services for our fictitious company, BigCo: activity, account, and company. We noticed they each have a different API style (JSON-only, JSON-link, and JSON-form), and we learned how to use the curl tool to make requests to those APIs and store the requests on a disk for later reference.



Learn what we have covered in this chapter.

Introduction

Understanding HTTP, REST, and APIs

Modeling APIs

Designing APIs

Describing APIs

Sketching APIs

Prototyping APIs

Building APIs

Testing APIs

Securing APIs

Deploying APIs

Modifying APIs

Some Parting Thoughts

Appendixes

Summary