The Web API Design Guidelines for Happy Developers
The Web API Design Guidelines for Happy Developers
A short pragmatic guide to build effective and funny Web APIs
About the Book
When developing a modern Web Application, it’s increasingly likely that you, as a developer, will need to use an API: be it a social network plugin API, an e-commerce checkout API, a Captcha, a Web Analytics suite. In today’s Web development APIs are ubiquitous.
But as you wandered through dozens of different APIs, you’ve certainly found out already that they’re not all born equal: for each API that is well thought, well documented, easy to understand and fun to use, there are dozens that are obscure and inconsistent, error-prone and tedious.
The goal of this ebook is to provide a set of guidelines through key points/tips on how to design Web APIs that are, at the same time: nice and sound, fun to use and logically consistent. We don’t like to call them REST, as we don’t want to introduce unneeded constraints in our guidelines. We prefer to call them Pragmatic Web APIs.
About the Authors
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- About the Authors
- Documentation
- Resource Names and URL Design
- API Base URL and Versioning
-
HTTP Methods
- Create with POST
- Read with GET
- Update with PUT
- Delete with… DELETE
- Limitations of HTTP PUT e DELETE
- Caching
- Rate Limiting
- Actions
- Errors and Statuses in Responses
-
Data Formats
- Dates and Time
-
Querying Resources
- Pagination
- Partial Responses
-
Security
- Authentication and Authorization
- Browser Same Origin Policy
- Software Development Kits
- Conclusions
- And… one more tip
- References
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