The Design of Web APIs

10 Designing a network-efficient API

This chapter covers

• Web API network communication concerns
• Using compression, caching, and conditional requests
• Optimizing API design to make fewer calls and exchange less data

So far, we’ve focused on designing APIs that provide usable, secure, and evolvable representations of goals that make sense for consumers and hide internal concerns. But in reality, we’ve learned to design ideal laboratory APIs, ignoring most of the context in which they are used—especially the network context.

Network communication efficiency is an important topic that any API designer must be aware of. Indeed, communication efficiency is important in our day-to-day lives. When you have a conversation with someone, either by speaking ...