Build APIs You Won't Hate
This book is 100% complete
Completed on 2016-03-30
About the Book
API development is becoming increasingly common for server-side developers thanks to the rise of front-end JavaScript frameworks, iPhone applications, and API-centric architectures. It might seem like grabbing stuff from a data source and shoving it out as JSON would be easy, but surviving changes in business logic, database schema updates, new features, or deprecated endpoints can be a nightmare.
After finding many of the existing resources for API development to be lacking, Phil learned a lot of things the hard way through years of trial and error. This book aims to condense that experience, taking examples and explanations further than the trivial apples and pears nonsense tutorials often provide.
Phil worked primarily as an API developer for the last three years. One horror was managing an API built in FuelPHP by a freelancer at the million dollar startup he joined. It was utilizing a then deprecated ORM which had been hacked to death by the previous developer, so took the time to delete that mess and build the next version in Laravel, leveraging it's simple routing, database migrations, schema, seeding, etc. When the following major version of the API was built no rewrite was required, and both managed to live side-by-side on the same "API" servers.
By passing on some best practices and general good advice you can hit the ground running with API development, combined with some horror stories and how they were overcome/avoided/averted. This book will discuss the theory of designing and building APIs in any language or framework, with this theory applied in PHP-based examples.
Some of the more advanced topics covered here are endpoint testing, embedding data objects in a consistent and scalable manner, paginating responses (including embedded objects) and hypermedia "HATEOAS" controls.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Sample Code
-
1. Useful Database Seeding
- 1.1 Introduction
- 1.2 Introduction to Database Seeding
- 1.3 Building Seeders
- 1.4 That is about it
- 1.5 Secondary Data
- 1.6 When to run this?
-
2. Planning and Creating Endpoints
- 2.1 Functional Requirements
- 2.2 Endpoint Theory
- 2.3 Planning Endpoints
-
3. Input and Output Theory
- 3.1 Introduction
- 3.2 Requests
- 3.3 Responses
- 3.4 Supporting Formats
- 3.5 Content Structure
-
4. Status Codes, Errors and Messages
- 4.1 Introduction
- 4.2 HTTP Status Codes
- 4.3 Error Codes and Error Messages
- 4.4 Error or Errors
- 4.5 Standards for Error Responses
- 4.6 Common Pitfalls
-
5. Endpoint Testing
- 5.1 Introduction
- 5.2 Concepts & Tools
- 5.3 Setup
- 5.4 Initialise
- 5.5 Features
- 5.6 Scenarios
- 5.7 Prepping Behat
- 5.8 Running Behat
-
6. Outputting Data
- 6.1 Introduction
- 6.2 The Direct Approach
- 6.3 Transformations with Fractal
- 6.4 Hiding Schema Updates
- 6.5 Outputting Errors
- 6.6 Testing this Output
- 6.7 Homework
-
7. Data Relationships
- 7.1 Introduction
- 7.2 Subresources
- 7.3 Foreign Key Arrays
- 7.4 Compound Documents (aka Sideloading)
- 7.5 Embedded Documents (aka Nesting)
- 7.6 Summary
-
8. Debugging
- 8.1 Introduction
- 8.2 Command-line Debugging
- 8.3 Browser Debugging
- 8.4 Network Debugging
-
9. Authentication
- 9.1 Introduction
- 9.2 When is Authentication Useful?
- 9.3 Different Approaches to Authentication
- 9.4 Implementing an OAuth 2.0 Server
- 9.5 Where the OAuth 2.0 Server Lives
- 9.6 Understanding OAuth 2.0 Grant Types
-
10. Pagination
- 10.1 Introduction
- 10.2 Paginators
- 10.3 Offsets and Cursors
-
11. Documentation
- 11.1 Introduction
- 11.2 Types of Documentation
- 11.3 Picking a Tool
- 11.4 Setting up API Blueprint and Aglio
- 11.5 Learning API Blueprint Syntax
- 11.6 Further Reading
-
12. HATEOAS
- 12.1 Introduction
- 12.2 Content Negotiation
- 12.3 Hypermedia Controls
-
13. API Versioning
- 13.1 Introduction
- 13.2 Different Approaches to API Versioning
- 13.3 Ask Your Users
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14. Bonus Chapter: File Uploads & Downloads
- 14.1 Introduction
- 14.2 Downloads
- 14.3 Uploads
- 14.4 Why Multipart is Fairly Awful
- 14.5 Method A: Direct File Upload
- 14.6 Method B: Upload from URL
- 14.7 What about Meta Data?
- 14.8 Summary
- Conclusion
-
Further Reading
- API Web Resources
- Non-API Books
Bundles that include this book
About the Author
Phil has seen a few trends come and go during a long and varied career of building stuff for money as an employee, freelancer, consultant and now CTO. One trend over recent years is the rise of APIs as an everyday part of the average server-side developers job.
Back in 2009 Phil released a CodeIgniter Rest Server, wrote a few articles about how to use it and built handfuls of APIs for his freelance clients. This tool was fairly basic, but covered HTTP-based routing, HTTP Basic/Digest/API Key authentication, added logging and throttling and did not force CRUD-based conventions. The internet seemed to like it, and this code is still used by Apple, the UN and USA.gov.
Later on as a core-contributor to FuelPHP he added this functionality to the core, and again built out a bunch of APIs for people. Then he got a job in NYC, to take over as Lead Engineer for a company that - you guessed it - had a FuelPHP API and wanted to improve it.
After two years of working on their API, Phil has moved to Ride.com, building their API with an amazing team of developers.
Phil has been building APIs for so long, he has come up with a very long list of ways to make them not suck, and he'd like to share the information with you all.
About the Contributors
Technical Review
Editor
Cameo Coder
Causes Supported
Code Club
https://www.codeclub.org.ukA nationwide network of volunteer-led after school coding clubs for children aged 9-11.
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