The market of API Development is all-time high with an increase of third-party Apis used for various front end and back end tasks. The increasing demand for APIs has created a need to apply key API best practices. Matrix Marketers is a web development company applying APIs for its core development.

But before you jump into creating APIs, in order to follow API best practices, you need to find the answers to the following questions. Why are you building an API? How should you mock your API? Why should you use nouns as resources? How should you implement hypermedia? How can you better manage and secure your APIs?

In this post, we will try to answer these questions so that the planning, designing, development, and management becomes easy. To start the API development, we must do the following:

Plan Your API

Planning is the first step involved in software development. The objective behind building the API should be clear to the developer. The APIs are programmed to do a specific task which is different from the generalized programming approach. This doesn’t mean that for doing different tasks, many APIs are required. The communication link between the APIs can be established. But data and methods of the API must be clearly defined. For developing APIs, a long-term planning is required to be done.

Spec-driven development

The success of any API depends on the APIs spec- driven development approach to maintain flexibility and standardization of the code. Check out the specification for which the API has to be developed. The spec-driven development allows you to choose precise tools to better design and develop API structure.

Nouns, CRUD, and more

To make sure that your API is flexible, extendable, agile, and accessible to other developers, used of CRUD and JSON can be the best practice which will not only help in developing better API but also makes the process much faster.

Hypermedia

Hypermedia is an extension of hypertext, very much like the HTML. To implement hypermedia effectively in API development the knowledge of three topics is a must.

• The most common arguments for and against hypermedia
• The state of hypermedia specs
• The availability of specs and their benefits

Response Handling

Response handling is the next logical step once APIs are built. An appropriate approach to check the status of HTTP status codes and return descriptive error messages on failure are required to note down and rectify for the future use.

API Management

In building APIs, you are creating a sword for developers to access specific data and services. It’s not enough to build and design the functionality of this sword, but also create the guidelines to ensure that everyone is learning to use the sword in right way other it may hurt the person using it. The documentation of the API plays an important role in making API to be a developer-friendly tool to further develop the complete software.

API Security

As the increase of APIs in web and mobile applications has become common. It is likely that a single API is used in many applications. Therefore, it is mandatory that the security of data and API must be ensured. The authentication and authorization of the API can be maintained by using some methods like HEAD, GET, OPTIONS and TRACE which do not change the state of the server.

Conclusion

Building an API is easy, but designing a useful, secure, future-proof API is not. Check Apply the top best practices from the series and tools you can use to get started. In case you are looking for the development of API based web or mobile applications, get in touch with Matrix Marketers! Our developers will surely develop the API as per your requirements.