Summary

In this chapter, we saw how to turn our API design into an actual working API. We learned about the power of using sketches to explore possibilities and ideas without having to commit to writing lots of code. The idea for API sketching comes from architect Frank Gehry’s habit of using sketches to explore his own building designs before committing to expensive detailed drawings and, ultimately, actual construction. Sketches are simple, cheap, and easy ways to test out ideas and share them with teams or customers.

We also learned how to use the online tool Apiary API Blueprint Editor as a sketching tool. We don’t need to use an online tool for sketches, however, we used Apiary Editor because, along with the ability to easily create sketches, we can use Apiary’s Mock Server feature to get them up and running at a live URL endpoint. That makes it possible to share our sketches with others; it even supports writing API calling code snippets to test our API sketch.

Finally, we saw some tips for creating helpful sketches, including:

• Sketching APIs in HTML to make them easy to test in a browser.
• Exploring different formats and API patterns that result in varying designs, including reducing the number of resources in our API.
• Sketches are just simple explorations. If we don’t like the ones we have, we can just toss them away and create more.