About These Documents This document is 3 of 3 which describe best practices for consuming APIs provided by others. Clarifying Issues Certain issues should be clarified before use of an external API. The two key matters for elucidation are data ownership and costing. You should be clear on which items will be owned by the [...]
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About These Documents This document is 2 of 3 which describe best practices for consuming APIs provided by others. Risk Management When relying on an externally hosted service there can be some element of risk such as loss of service, change in price of a service or performance problems. Some providers may feel the need [...]
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About These Documents This document is 1 of 3 which describe best practices for consuming APIs provided by others. Be Careful In Selecting The APIs Choose the APIs you use carefully. You can find potential APIs by signing up to RSS feeds, registering for email notifications for when new APIs are released, checking forums and [...]
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Make Sure the API Works Make your API scalable (i.e. able to cope with a high number of hits), extendable and design for updates. Test your APIs as thoroughly as you would test your user interfaces and where relevant, ensure that it returns valid XML (i.e. no missing or invalid namespaces, or invalid characters). Embed [...]
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Provide Documentation Although a good API should be, by its very nature, intuitive and theoretically not need documentation it is good practice to provide clear useful documentation and examples for prospective developers. This documentation should be well written, clear and full. Inaccurate, inappropriate or documentation of your API is the easiest way to lose users. [...]
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Seek To Follow Standards It is advisable to follow standards where applicable. If possible it makes sense to piggy-back on to accepted Web-oriented standards and use well know standards from international authorities: IEEE, W3C, OAI or from successful, established companies. You could refer to the W3C Web Applications Working Group. Where an existing standard isn’t [...]
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About The Best Practices For APIs Documents This document is the first in a series of four briefing documents which provide advice on the planning processes for the creation of APIs. The Importance of Planning As with other activities, design of APIs projects requires effective planning. Rather than just adding an API to an existing [...]
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What is a Web API? API stands for ‘application programming interface’. An API is the interface that a computer system, computer library or application provides to allow requests for services to be made of it by other programs and/or to allow data to be exchanged between them. A Web API is the Web version of [...]
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