Chapter 13. Designing an API

This chapter covers

  • Building an API using new Rails 3 features
  • Rate-limiting the API
  • Versioning APIs

In the past chapters, you’ve created a great application that allows your users to manage projects and tickets through a web browser. In this chapter, you are going to create a way for your users to manage this content through what’s known as an Application Programming Interface (API). As its name implies, an API is a programming interface (for your application) that returns either JavaScript Object Notation[1] (JSON) or XML[2] data for its requests, which are the two most common formats for modern APIs to return information in. People can then create programs or libraries (referred to as clients) to read and ...

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