Design and Build Great Web APIs

API Sketching Example

Like the pencil sketches Gehry uses to explore possible building designs, you can create “API sketches” to explore your API designs. For example, in the Onboarding API project we’ve been working on over the past several chapters, we have the startOnboarding action defined in our ALPS document in ​Adding Action Elements​. Let’s walk through a sample “design sprint” for just this one element of our API.

For starters, our ALPS document includes the following element that describes the startOnboarding action:

...

{"id" : "startOnboarding", "type" : "unsafe", "rt" : "wip"}

...

Now we need to turn that into an actual message that would be sent from the API provider to an API client application. One possible API response ...