Building quality APIs is essential to facilitating equally quality software. This article will look at some tips and best practices you should remember when building and consuming APIs and how to ensure that your software is of a high quality. Think about it like this, If a waiter in a restaurant has terrible habits, then the restaurant’s overall quality will be affected.
Is the API easily readable?
Readability includes API definitions and response messages.
Understand API workflow
Workflow concerns how an API collects data input and converts it to information
- Knowing the workflow of the API also gives you a better view of what the endpoints are and the various functions to expect
- For example, an appointment scheduling API will collect data from the user, which it will use to create an appointment, and add a date to remind the user when the appointment is due
Is the API easy to use?
Implementing a good design structure and a straightforward process in your API will simplify its use by other developers
Is the API complete?
An incomplete API can make things complicated for the users.
- Make your API open source and give it good collaboration support with tools like Github to allow it to get to completion faster
- If the API is incomplete, users may not be able to build full-fledged applications.
