June 2008
Intermediate to advanced
400 pages
14h 4m
English
Content preview from Practical API Design
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
Start your free trial
PART I
Theory and Justification
The process of inventing, designing, and writing application programming interfaces (APIs) can either be seen as an artistic or as a scientific pursuit. Depending on your point of view, the API architect is an artist trying to change worlds or an engineer building bridges between them. Most people I know would rather be artists, because artists are associated with creativity, spontaneity, and beauty. However, a purely artistic approach has one significant problem: emotions are not transferable. They are extremely subjective. Explaining them to others is fraught with complexity. Although it is possible to create ...