The Universal Principles of Design is a classic design text cataloging more than 100 design principles from a variety of disciplines.
Application developers are the customers of a Web API. Success is measured by how quickly app developers enjoy success using your API in their applications. And rapid adoption of a Web API is all about design.
A customer of ours once said it best - “...most open APIs start out as little more than raw, naked, features exposed to developers, and there is a big gap between a feature and a full-fledged service.” This e-book is about the capabilities ‘around the API’ that might be needed to ‘productize’, ‘monetize’, or ‘operationalize’ an API-based service.
As the API and apps economy continues to evolve, a design problem arises for API designers when internal systems are too complex to expose directly to app developers. The goal of an API Facade Pattern is to articulate those internal systems and make them useful and consumable by app developers.
In April 2012, O'Reilly hosted a webinar by the authors of the O'Reilly book "APIs: A Strategy Guide." Video and slides are below. The book is an overview of API strategy for business executives and this webinar dives into both public and private API strategies. Thanks to O'Reilly, @daniel_jacobson, @gbrail and @danwoodscito. Courtesy of O'Reilly, a free chapter is posted here.
What makes for a great API design? What will make the developers who use your API successful quickly? What debates and decisions go on behind the scenes before an API team launches an API?
We're in a data-driven and Web API economy. Web API designers need to define what and how data should be exposed from a variety of apps, services, and stores. What are the challenges of unlocking your data and opening up access in a straightforward and standards-compliant manner? Is OData the right tool for the job? What does it mean from the point of view of designing an API?
