Chapter 14
Designing for Change
You have to be really consciously careful about API design. APIs are forever. Once you put the API out there, maybe you can version it, but you can’t take it away from your customers once you’ve built it like this. Being conservative and minimalistic in your API design helps you build fundamental tools on which you may be able to add more functionality, or which partners can build layers on top of.
— Werner Vogels
Managing change is not easy, yet it is an inevitable part of maturing an API. For developers working within a single codebase, change can be difficult but is manageable. Refactoring tools and automated test coverage are leveraged to assess the impact of a change.
When the change involves Web-based APIs, ...
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