September 2018
Intermediate to advanced
230 pages
5h 11m
English
Content preview from Designing Web APIs
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Chapter 7. Managing Change
Good design is never frozen in time. Just because you made a great design today does not mean that it will continue to be good when change is afoot. Good APIs need to be able to adapt and change along with the evolution of your product or business.
Breaking changes are one of the common pitfalls of many APIs. In this chapter, we discuss how to approach change with an eye for consistency as well as how to ensure backward compatibility as your API evolves.
Toward Consistency
Consistency is the hallmark of excellent experiences of any kind—APIs are no exception. Consistency builds trust. Trust is the foundation to creating a thriving developer ecosystem.
Here are some of the hallmarks of consistency:
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Developers are able to build a mental model of how to access data in your system.
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Response objects are formulated with strict types and meaningful names; that is, each model is the same regardless of the endpoint.
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Developers can use the same request patterns across a number of endpoints, which reduces the need for middleware and helps ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.