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 explored the challenges of modifying APIs once they’re placed into production. We reviewed the principles that govern changes to production APIs: first, do no harm, forking the API, and knowing when to say no. We also covered the three rules of designing and implementing API updates: take nothing away, don’t redefine things, and make additions optional. We also discussed the importance of continuing to use existing tests to confirm that our updates don’t break any current API consumers, as well as discussed new, standalone tests for the added features of our updated API.

We spent time on the set of tasks needed to properly deploy API updates into production, including supporting reversibility, using side-by-side deployment, and the challenges of employing the overwriting release tactic. Finally, we reviewed the issues we need to address when shutting down a production API, such as communicating the shutdown, releasing the code and/or interface for others to use, and marking our API with an HTTP `410 GONE` status and response message to ensure others who encounter the original service in the future will know what happened.


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

Testing APIs

Securing APIs

Deploying APIs

Modifying APIs

Some Parting Thoughts

Appendixes

Summary