"APIs are forever," said AWS’ CTO, Werner Vogels in a recent blog post. He also discussed how difficult, if not impossible, it is to change APIs once you have customers using them, which is especially true at AWS-level scale and customer adoption. The fact is, if you've spent much time with APIs, creating a great API from scratch is tricky and often requires several iterations to perfect. Adding to this challenge, if you change your APIs too rapidly, it will cause a lot of frustration among your developer community, which are the same early adopters you want evangelizing your tech. That is why it is important to do as much design and iteration work up front before publishing your APIs to a broader audience.
Having a solution like JustAPIs can help you quickly define, test, and deploy APIs at scale. JustAPIs makes it very easy to create an API from scratch, re-use business logic, and do A/B testing on API signatures to see which design works better. Once you have tried different variants of your API you will feel more comfortable that the API you publish has been road-tested and optimized for your audience, thus reducing the risk of having to make painful changes in production.
Given the growing popularity and importance of API creation, we thought it would be helpful to come up with a list of best practices that can guide developers. Below are 20 best practices to be aware of when building APIs:
If you have more to add to our list, we’d love to hear them - drop us a line at info@anypresence.com. You can also get started for free with our API creation tool, JustAPIs.