Best Practice in Web Service Design

Best Practice in API Design

About This Talk • The sum of my experiences • Building APIs • Consuming APIs • Maintaining my own APIs • Contains: • HTTP theory • Service types and data formats • Design pointers 2

When To Use An APITimes you want to build an API: • To share data to another app • To give users better control/access to their data • To build a modular, scalable system 3

Service

Design

Request and Response

Statelessness

Status Codes

Status CodesWin/Fail indicator 11

Status CodesWin/Fail indicator Common codes: 200 OK 302 Found 301 Moved 401 Not Authorised 403 Forbidden 404 Not Found 500 Internal Server Error 11

Headers

HTTP HeadersHeaders are the metadata about the content we send/receiveUseful headers: • Accept and Content-Type: used for content format negotiation • User-Agent: to identify what made the request • Set-Cookie and Cookie: working with cookie data • Authorization: controlling access 13

HTTP Verbs • More than GET and POST • PUT and DELETE to update and delete in a RESTful service • HEAD, OPTIONS and others also speciﬁed GET Read POST CreateIn REST, we use: PUT Update DELETE Delete 15

Service

RPC Services

RPC: Remote Procedure Call • Single endpoint • Function name • Parameters • Return value 18

RPC Services • XML-RPC • JSON-RPC • Soap 19

RPC Services • XML-RPC • JSON-RPC • Soap • other loose RPC services 19

JSON vs XML vs ?

JSON • JavaScript Object Notation • Lightweight • Ideal for devices • Native in many languages • Great for AJAX applications 21

XML • EXtensible Markup Lanugage • Verbose and precise • Best option for machine-to-machine 22

RESTful Services • REpresentational State Transfer • URLs are unique resource identiﬁers • HTTP verbs indicate which operation should happen • We have full CRUD operations on a series of resources 25

Design

Target Audience

Statelessness

Version Parameter

Status Codes

Consistency

Small APIs

Heartbeat

Handling Errors

Content Negotiation

Access Control

Access Control Do Not Reinvent the Wheel • Username/password • SSL • Tokens • OpenID/SAML/LDAP 37

Delivery and Support

Web Service Design

Thanks! http://joind.in/3387 @lornajane http://lornajane.net/ 40

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Best Practice in Web Service Design

by Lorna Mitchell

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Best Practice in Web Service Design Presentation Transcript