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 the concept of generating prototypes for our API as a final step before committing resources and time to writing the actual code to implement our design. For our API work, we used OpenAPI Specification (OAS), formerly known as Swagger, to build up our working prototype in detail from our initial design. We learned how to use OAS document elements such as `info`, `components`, and `paths` to build up the definitions of our endpoints, as well as how to use `parameters`, `requestBodies`, and `responses` to fill in the details of each API URL and method in our prototype.

Finally, we learned to use the SwaggerHub Editor to do our live editing, generate our mock server for prototype testing, and generate technical API documentation. We also learned how to use the external documentation generator ReDocly to quickly and easily create interactive API documentation from our OAS file.


Review what we have covered in this chapter.


Summary

Review 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

Build a Rest API for an Image-Sharing App With Node.js

Testing APIs

Securing APIs

Deploying APIs

Deploying a Web Application to Heroku Using CLI

Modifying APIs

Some Parting Thoughts

Appendixes

Summary