API Design
In this chapter, we will talk about the basic application programming interface (API) design principles. We will see how to start our design by defining useful abstractions that will create the foundation for the design.
We will then present the principles for RESTful interfaces, covering both the strict, academic definition and a more practical definition to help when making designs. We will look at design approaches and techniques to help create a useful API based on standard practices. We will also spend some time talking about authentication, as this is a critical element for most APIs.
We will focus in this book on RESTful interfaces, as they are the most common right now. Before that, there were other alternatives, including Remote Procedure Call (RPC) in the 80s, a way to make a remote function call, or Single Object Access Protocol (SOAP) in the early 2000s, which standardized the format of the remote call. Current RESTful interfaces are easier to...
