Patterns for API Design

As thousands of developers focus on constructing reliable, well-performing, and secure APIs, there's immense demand for a practical, up-to-date, technology-and-platform-independent guide to API design. API Design Patterns fills this gap. A team of expert authors cut through the complexity of API communication and message content, presenting rich and complete design guidelines and heuristics for engineering APIs sustainably and specifying them clearly. API Design Patterns covers the entire API lifecycle, from launching projects and establishing business goals through defining architecturally significant requirements, elaborating and implementing designs, and documentation. It illuminates patterns drawn from both public web APIs and proprietary application development and software integration projects the authors have led or participated in. You'll find a complete library of concrete, actionable design patterns, each formatted consistently to explain context, forces, problem, solution, discussion, and known uses. Throughout, the authors share practical insights for making better design decisions and tradeoffs, facilitating easier implementation, and structuring and designing higher-quality APIs to meet both short- and long-term needs. You'll learn how to: Facilitate better API design discussions by establishing a common vocabulary, identifying key decisions, and comparing realistic options Simplify design reviews and accelerate objective comparisons Plan to smoothly evolve and extend APIs without compromising backward-compatibility Enhance documentation with useful design knowledge to help client developers quickly grasp API capabilities and constraints, and confidently use your APIs