Best Practice in API Design

About Me

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• Lorna Jane Mitchell

• http://lornajane.net

• PHP consultant, developer, trainer

• Author, speaker

Using APIs

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There are various stages:

1. publish

Using APIs

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There are various stages:

1. publish

2. dogfood

Using APIs

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There are various stages:

1. publish

2. dogfood

3. modularity

Web

Service

Design

Web

HTTP

Request and Response

Statelessness

Status Codes

Status Codes: Headline News

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Common codes:

200 OK

302 Found

301 Moved

401 Not Authorised

403 Forbidden

404 Not Found

500 Internal Server Error

Headers

HTTP Headers

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Headers are the metadata about the content we send/receive

Useful headers:

• Accept and Content-Type: used for content format negotiation

Content Negotiation

HTTP Headers

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Headers are the metadata about the content we send/receive

Useful headers:

• Accept and Content-Type: used for content format negotiation

• User-Agent: to identify what made the request

HTTP Headers

16

Headers are the metadata about the content we send/receive

Useful headers:

• Accept and Content-Type: used for content format negotiation

• User-Agent: to identify what made the request

• Set-Cookie and Cookie: working with cookie data

HTTP Headers

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Headers are the metadata about the content we send/receive

Useful headers:

• Accept and Content-Type: used for content format negotiation

• User-Agent: to identify what made the request

• Set-Cookie and Cookie: working with cookie data

• Authorization: controlling access

Access Control

Verbs

HTTP Verbs

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• More than GET and POST

• PUT and DELETE to update and delete in a RESTful service

• HEAD, OPTIONS and others also specified

In REST, we use:

GET Read

POST Create

PUT Update

DELETE Delete

Service

Target Audience

Heartbeat

RPC Services

RPC: Remote Procedure Call

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• Single endpoint

• Function name

• Parameters

• Return value

• SOAP is a kind of RPC

Soap

Data Formats

Small APIs

REST

RESTful Services

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• REpresentational State Transfer

• URLs are unique resource identifiers

• HTTP verbs indicate which operation should happen

• We have full CRUD operations on a series of resources

Design

Versioning

Consistency

Handling Errors

Delivery and Support

Web Service Design

Thanks!

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https://joind.in/6385

@lornajane

http://lornajane.net/