Phil Sturgeon - Build APIs You Won't Hate - 2015 (+Code)

Build APIs You Will not Hate

Year: 2015
Author: Phil Sturgeon
Genre: Textbook
Publisher: Leanpub
ISBN: no
Language English
Format: PDF, EPUB, MOBI
Quality: initially computer (eBook)
Interactive contents: Yes
Number of pages: 181

Description:

Tasked with building an API for your company but do not have a clue where to start? Taken over an existing API and hate it? Built your own API and still hate it? This book is for you.

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
Useful Database Seeding
Introduction
Introduction to Database Seeding
Building Seeders
That is about it
Secondary Data
When to run this?
Planning and Creating Endpoints
Functional Requirements
Endpoint Theory
Planning Endpoints
Input and Output Theory
Introduction
Requests
Responses
Supporting Formats
Content Structure
Status Codes, Errors and Messages
Introduction
HTTP Status Codes
Error Codes and Error Messages
Error or Errors
Standards for Error Responses
Common Pitfalls
Endpoint Testing
Introduction
Concepts & Tools
Setup
Initialise
Features
Scenarios
Prepping Behat
Running Behat
Outputting Data
Introduction
The Direct Approach
Transformations with Fractal
Hiding Schema Updates
Outputting Errors
Testing this Output
Homework
Data Relationships
Introduction
Sub-Resources
Foreign Key Arrays
Compound Documents (a.k.a Side-Loading)
Embedded Documents (a.k.a Nesting)
Summary
Debugging
Introduction
Command-line Debugging
Browser Debugging
Network Debugging
Authentication
Introduction
When is Authentication Useful?
Different Approaches to Authentication
Implementing an OAuth 2.0 Server
Where the OAuth 2.0 Server Lives
Understanding OAuth 2.0 Grant Types
Pagination
Introduction
Paginators
Offsets and Cursors
Documentation
Introduction
Types of Documentation
Picking a Tool
Setting up API Blueprint and Aglio
Learning API Blueprint Syntax
Further Reading
HATEOAS
Introduction
Content Negotiation
Hypermedia Controls
API Versioning
Introduction
Different Approaches to API Versioning
Ask Your Users
Conclusion
Further Reading