You don’t need to see 5,000 APIs to know some are better than others. One of the reasons is the attention the API providers have paid to the designs of their APIs. Below are three people summarizing popular approaches and helping you think about API design, whether you’re using someone else’s or planning your own offering.
Apperian encourages you to think about extensibility in the video embedded below:
Among the tips are to focus on the most scenarios and aim for self-documenting APIs.
Google’s Joshua Bloch has a great presentation (PDF). His general principles should not be skipped:
A good overview of common approaches to APIs. Includes explanations of HTTP GET/POST, *-RPC, SOAP, “REST” (yes, in quotes) and Hypermedia.
I’m sure there are many other great examples of API design best practices. I hope you’ll add your favorites in the comments.
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4 Responses to “Three Ways to Think About API Design”
at 7:08 am
Great article, couldn’t agree more! We at Apiary think that the current state of API documentation on the web is very sad. And we’re building tools that help you deliver great API documentation with little effort and integrated into you development workflow. Drop me a line if you want to help us in our private beta.
at 10:03 am
As one who consumes a lot of different APIs, I’ll add to make it easy to explore. Maybe it was Twitter or Gowalla that first added the test consoles directly on their sites, but that’s a great idea for producers of APIs. Short of that, as an API producer you better have a good reason for not letting me use tools like curl/hurl.it to explore your API. (had a frustrating experience lately with an API that required OAuth signing on all requests, even user less ones)
at 3:32 pm
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at 3:10 am
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