API Design Patterns

2 Introduction to API design patterns

This chapter covers

• What an API design pattern is
• Why API design patterns are important
• The anatomy and structure of an API design pattern
• Designing an API with and without design patterns

Now that we have a grasp of what APIs are and what makes them “good,” we can explore how we might apply different patterns when building an API. We’ll start by exploring what API design patterns are, why they matter, and how they’ll be described in later chapters. Finally, we’ll look at an example API and see how using pre-built API design patterns can save lots of time and future headaches.

2.1 What are API design patterns?

Before we start exploring API design patterns we have to lay a bit of groundwork, starting with ...