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 learned the importance of Donald Norman’s action cycle as a way to think about how we model our own APIs, and we introduced our own API action cycle called the RPW Loop.

We then applied our understanding of this common interaction cycle to model our own Onboarding API cycle. We did this in two main steps. First, we mapped out the API workflow in a simple diagram to help us see the big picture. Second, we talked to people at BigCo Inc., gathered up their handwritten forms, and created our internal cycle (IC) documents that we’ll use later when we need to actually design and build our Onboarding API.

We also learned how to use the npm command-line utility as a project management tool. We learned how to create our `package.json` control document, how to install other packages, and how to modify configuration settings. Finally, we modified our Git settings to ignore some files and folders managed by npm and then used Git to update our local files and send those changes to our remote GitHub repository for later use.


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