Download - Introduction to APIs - What, Why and How at CodeCore Bootcamp

Introduction to APIsCodeCore Community Week

April 25, 2014

Ganesh Swamiwww.silota.com

Hi

• Programming professionally for 10+ years

• x86 assembly, STL, boost, python-boost, python

SILOTA• Search As A Service

• full stack: crawling, indexing, retrieving, tag deployment

• First class developer experience (DX)

• documentation

• testing

• sandbox

• 800+ search engines in production!

APIs: What & Why

What is an API?Application Programming Interface

!An API is the interface implemented by an

application which allows other applications to communicate with it.

What is an API?

communicate

Why build an API?

• explosion of devices connected to the internet

• can be a company’s greatest asset

• bizdev 2.0: internal developers, consultants, partners, customers

Sample APIs• aws

• dropbox

• instagram

• pinterest

• github

• stripe

• salesforce

• twillio

• …

Source: Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends 2013

APIs: How

What is REST?• REpresentational State Transfer

• logical resources manipulated with HTTP verbs

• modern best practice

• wide adoption

• contrast with SOAP

HTTP Clients

Request Response

GET /simtec/httpgallery/introduction/ HTTP/1.1 Accept:*/* Accept-‐Language: en-‐gb Accept-‐Encoding: gzip, deflate User-‐Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0) Host: www.httpwatch.com Connection: Keep-‐Alive !!!!!

HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: Microsoft-‐IIS/5.1 Date: Mon, 04 Oct 2004 12:04:43 GMT X-‐Powered-‐By: ASP.NET X-‐AspNet-‐Version: 1.1.4322 Cache-‐Control: no-‐cache Pragma: no-‐cache Expires: -‐1 Content-‐Type: text/html; charset=utf-‐8 Content-‐Length: 8307 !<html> <head> ...

HTTP Verbs

• GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE

Status Codes

2xx OK, created, all good, carry on

4xx User error: bad API key, malformed data, item not found, etc.

5xx Server error

Embrace HTTPGET /document Retrieve all documents

GET /document/19 Retrieve a specific document #19

POST /document Create a new document

PUT /document/19 Update an existing document #19

DELETE /document/19 Delete an existing document #19

Postman: Chrome Extension

Bipartite graph/documents /documents/:id …

GET

POST error

PUT error

PATCH error

DELETE

Best practicessecurity

base URLs

serialization

timestamps

versioning

caching

gzip

logging

Best practicessecurity https all the way

base URLs api.companyname.com

serialization json

timestamps ISO 8601 & UTC

versioning /v1/

caching ETag & Last-Modified

gzip always & pretty print responses

logging if possible

Recap

• https + gzip + json

• use bipartite graph of nouns and verbs

• great documentation

• no surprises

Integration Challenges

Read on www.silota.com next week!

http://www.silota.com

Handling Timeouts

The Pitch

BENEFITSCOSTS

What We Give (investment)

What We Get (return)

References• How to Design a Good API and Why it Matters:

• http://lcsd05.cs.tamu.edu/slides/keynote.pdf

• Best Practices for Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API

• http://www.vinaysahni.com/best-practices-for-a-pragmatic-restful-api

• REST worst practices:

• http://jacobian.org/writing/rest-worst-practices/

• Building RESTful APIs: http://www.slideshare.net/silota/building-restful-apis

http://lcsd05.cs.tamu.edu/slides/keynote.pdf

http://jacobian.org/writing/rest-worst-practices/

http://www.slideshare.net/silota/building-restful-apis

Keep in touch!

Ganesh Swami!

www.silota.com

[email protected]

@gane5h