Articles

The REST of the 10 Commandments

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One of the core things I’ve been working on for the past 10 years is APIs — everything from simple APIs that are used by one client to multi-device and multi-purpose APIs. During those years, I’ve also had the opportunity to work with many third-party APIs like Stripe, Twilio, and others who are less popular and glamorous. Almost all of those APIs were REST-based and unique in some way. 

There are many reasons why REST is so popular. It’s simple to understand, it’s flexible, it works on any scale, it has a great community and tools built around it. But besides those, I’d also say that a lot of popularity came from the fact that’s its oldest rival, SOAP, is just horrible.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

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The Value of Internal APIs

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Internal APIs are designed primarily to streamline software development and simplify systems and operational processes. These currently represent the vast majority of use cases.

Internal APIs are often overlooked since they are aimed at in-house developers. These types of APIs generally work with proprietary data specific to a company and its departments. Although this data must be protected, it must also be accessible to those who work with it. Internal APIs allow for exactly this kind of secure access, creating more efficient development cycles for their products.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

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API Best Practices for Feature Deprecation

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TL;DR Talk to your users

Most people who write software for a living have one thing in common – they don’t want to be stuck supporting all of the software they’ve developed forever.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

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What Are Good Traits That Make Great API Product Managers

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As more companies realize the benefits of an API-first mindset and treating their APIs as products, there is a growing need for good API product management practices to make a company’s API strategy a reality. However, API product management is a relatively new field with little established knowledge on what is API product management and what a PM should be doing to ensure their API platform is successful.

Many of the current practices of API product management have carried over from other products and platforms like web and mobile, but API products have their own unique set of challenges due to the way they are marketed and used by customers. While it would be rare for a consumer mobile app to have detailed developer docs and a developer relations team, you’ll find these items common among API product-focused companies. A second unique challenge is that APIs are very developer-centric and many times API PMs are engineers themselves. Yet, this can cause an API or developer program to lose empathy for what their customers actually want if good processes are not in place. Just because you’re an engineer, don’t assume your customers will want the same features and use cases that you want.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

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How to Best Monitor GraphQL APIs

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Since its release in 2015, GraphQL has become the alternative to REST. It gives frontend developers the flexibility they had craved for for so long.

Over are the days of begging backend developers for one-purpose-endpoints. Now a query can define all the data that is needed and request it in one go, cutting latency down considerably.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

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Best Practices for Building SDKs for APIs

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In 2020, you can’t be a B2B company without having an API program. Whether your API is the product or APIs are leveraged to enable additional integrations and functionality for your web app.

Even though an SDK could seem simple in terms of lines of code, SDKs need to be reliable and handle scale with ease. A poorly designed SDK could cripple your customer’s infrastructure and reduce trust in your service. At Moesif, we put a lot of effort into creating SDKs that are both high performance while adding in fail-safes in case bad things happen. This article walks through some of those practices. Given Moesif is an API analytics service, some of these practices are specific to high-volume data collection. However, other features are applicable regardless of your SDK purpose.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

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