Using a web API to provide services to application developers is one of the more satisfying endeavors that software engineers undertake. But building a popular API with a thriving developer ecosystem is also one of the most challenging. With this practical guide, developers, architects, and tech leads will learn how to navigate complex decisions for designing, scaling, marketing, and evolving interoperable APIs. Authors Brenda Jin, Saurabh Sahni, and Amir Shevat explain API design theory and provide hands-on exercises for building your web API and managing its operation in production. You’ll also learn how to build and maintain a following of app developers. This book includes expert advice, worksheets, checklists, and case studies from companies including Slack, Stripe, Facebook, Microsoft, Cloudinary, Oracle, and GitHub. Get an overview of request-response and event-driven API design paradigms Learn best practices for designing an API that meets the needs of your users Use a template to create an API design process Scale your web API to support a growing number of API calls and use cases Regularly adapt the API to reflect changes to your product or business Provide developer resources that include API documentation, samples, and tools

APIs are transforming the business world at an increasing pace. Gain the essential skills needed to quickly design, build, and deploy quality web APIs that are robust, reliable, and resilient. Go from initial design through prototyping and implementation to deployment of mission-critical APIs for your organization. Test, secure, and deploy your API with confidence and avoid the "release into production" panic. Tackle just about any API challenge with more than a dozen open-source utilities and common programming patterns you can apply right away. Good API design means starting with the API-First principle - understanding who is using the API and what they want to do with it - and applying basic design skills to match customers' needs while solving business-critical problems. Use the Sketch-Design-Build method to create reliable and scalable web APIs quickly and easily without a lot of risk to the day-to-day business operations. Create clear sequence diagrams, accurate specifications, and machine-readable API descriptions all reviewed, tested, and ready to turn into fully-functional NodeJS code. Create reliable test collections with Postman and implement proper identity and access control security with AuthO-without added cost or risk to the company. Deploy all of this to Heroku using a continuous delivery approach that pushes secure, well-tested code to your public servers ready for use by both internal and external developers. From design to code to test to deployment, unlock hidden business value and release stable and scalable web APIs that meet customer needs and solve important business problems in a consistent and reliable manner.

Design and build Web APIs for a broad range of clients—including browsers and mobile devices—that can adapt to change over time. This practical, hands-on guide takes you through the theory and tools you need to build evolvable HTTP services with Microsoft’s ASP.NET Web API framework. In the process, you’ll learn how design and implement a real-world Web API. Ideal for experienced .NET developers, this book’s sections on basic Web API theory and design also apply to developers who work with other development stacks such as Java, Ruby, PHP, and Node. Dig into HTTP essentials, as well as API development concepts and styles Learn ASP.NET Web API fundamentals, including the lifecycle of a request as it travels through the framework Design the Issue Tracker API example, exploring topics such as hypermedia support with collection+json Use behavioral-driven development with ASP.NET Web API to implement and enhance the application Explore techniques for building clients that are resilient to change, and make it easy to consume hypermedia APIs Get a comprehensive reference on how ASP.NET Web API works under the hood, including security and testability

The Full-Lifecycle Guide to API Design Principles of Web API Design brings together principles and processes to help you succeed across the entire API design lifecycle. Drawing on extensive in-the-trenches experience, leading consultant James Higginbotham helps you align every stakeholder on specific outcomes, design APIs that deliver value, and scale the design process from small teams to the entire organization. Higginbotham helps you bring an "outside-in" perspective to API design to reflect the voices of customers and product teams, map requirements to specific and well-organized APIs, and choose the right API style for writing them. He walks through a real-world example from the ground up, offering guidance for anyone designing new APIs or extending existing APIs. Deliver great APIs by getting your design processes right Gain agreement on specific outcomes from design teams, customers, and other stakeholders Craft job stories, conduct EventStorming, and model capabilities Identify the right APIs, and organize operations into coherent API profiles Choose the best styles for each project: REST, gRPC, GraphQL, or event-based async APIs Refine designs based on feedback from documenters, testers, and customers Decompose APIs into microservices Mature your API program, implementing design and management processes that scale This guide is invaluable for anyone involved in planning or building APIs--architects, developers, team leaders, managers in single and multi-team environments, and any technical or business professional delivering "API-as-a-product" offerings. Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

Summary A Web API is a platform with a web-style interface developers can use to implement functionality. Well-designed APIs feel like a natural extension of the application, rather than just a new interface into the backend database. Designing Web APIs based on use cases allows an organization to develop irresistible APIs, which developers can consume easily and which support the business values of that organization. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the Technology It takes a village to deliver an irresistible web API. Business stakeholders look for an API that works side-by-side with the main product to enhance the experience for customers. Project managers require easy integration with other products or ways for customers to interact with your system. And, developers need APIs to consistently interoperate with external systems. The trick is getting the whole village together. This book shows you how. About the Book Irresistible APIspresents a process to create APIs that succeed for all members of the team. In it, you'll learn how to capture an application's core business value and extend it with an API that will delight the developers who use it. Thinking about APIs from the business point of view, while also considering the end-user experience, encourages you to explore both sides of the design process and learn some successful biz-to-dev communication patterns. Along the way, you'll start to view your APIs as part of your product's core value instead of just an add-on. What's Inside Design-driven development Developing meaningful use cases API guiding principles How to recognize successful APIs About the Reader Written for all members of an API design team, regardless of technical level. About the Author Kirsten Hunter is an API evangelist who helps developers and business stakeholders understand, design, and deliver amazing APIs. Table of Contents UNDERSTANDING WEB APIs What makes an API irresistible? Working with web APIs API First Web services explained DESIGNING WEB APIs Guiding principles for API design Defining the value for your API Creating your schema model Design-driven development Empowering your developers

The basic rules of REST APIs - "many nouns, few verbs, stick with HTTP" - seem easy, but that simplicity and power require discipline to work smoothly. This brief guide provides next steps for implementing complex projects on simple and extensible foundations.

The popularity of REST in recent years has led to tremendous growth in almost-RESTful APIs that don’t include many of the architecture’s benefits. With this practical guide, you’ll learn what it takes to design usable REST APIs that evolve over time. By focusing on solutions that cross a variety of domains, this book shows you how to create powerful and secure applications, using the tools designed for the world’s most successful distributed computing system: the World Wide Web. You’ll explore the concepts behind REST, learn different strategies for creating hypermedia-based APIs, and then put everything together with a step-by-step guide to designing a RESTful Web API. Examine API design strategies, including the collection pattern and pure hypermedia Understand how hypermedia ties representations together into a coherent API Discover how XMDP and ALPS profile formats can help you meet the Web API "semantic challenge" Learn close to two-dozen standardized hypermedia data formats Apply best practices for using HTTP in API implementations Create Web APIs with the JSON-LD standard and other the Linked Data approaches Understand the CoAP protocol for using REST in embedded systems