What’s Next?

So far, we’ve learned about all the aspects of designing an intuitive API that’s easy to use and implement. We’ve explored designing APIs for various foundational and advanced design problems and looked at the best practices for designing robust and scalable APIs. These APIs can meet the needs of a wide range of users according to defined functional requirements. Moving forward, let’s take a look at what next steps we can take after gaining expertise in API designs. The following sections discuss the sequence of the steps to take after the API design is ready, starting with the implementation of the API design.

Implementation

The two approaches that are used for the implementation of APIs are given below:

• Design-first approach

• Code-first approach

The following illustration explains the difference between the two approaches:

In this course, we opted for the design-first approach and defined all the various aspects of API designs using the REDCAMEL approach. All the functional and non-functional requirements, design considerations, API model, and latency budget estimation are explained in detail in each design problem. Once all the aspects have been clearly defined and agreed upon, the next step is implementing the API design through coding. A careful selection of programming languages to develop an API can improve the development experience. Once the API has been developed, it’s ready for testing, as discussed in the following section.

Testing

API testing comprises the process of verifying that an API is ...