Nowadays, you can find web APIs everywhere you look, and developers create more of them each day. On the one hand, that’s a good thing: it shows we’re living in an age of interoperability. On the other hand, the shift towards heavily API-based platforms brings with it severe technical overhead. Read more
A global company shares its ingredients for a holistic API
When businesses decide that they want to become an “API-first company,” the first big step is to create an “API-first strategy.” That involves big discussions around the architectural and technical aspects of building a scalable, reliable, and lightweight API. Read more
Transactional emails are messages sent in response to various triggers, like user signups, password resets, and other app-specific events. You can send transactional emails through your own servers using a protocol called SMTP — that’s Simple Mail Transfer Protocol — but it’s a lot more nuanced than it sounds. Read more
We interview three experts on the state of REST API design
Representational State Transfer, or REST, is a dominant architectural pattern. Since Roy Fielding conceived it in 2000, REST has become the predominant method to design robust web APIs. However, with the advent of new application demands, some question whether REST is right for every single use case. Read more
Testing is an essential part of the software development process. Without testing, developers would be unable to ensure a product is functional, or discover and root out bugs from their applications.
As a result, it is an industry-standard for any piece of software to undergo many rounds of rigorous and repeated testing. Read more
The API ecosystem is facing a serious scalability issue. While current responsibilities associated with designing, coding, and maintaining APIs are still very manageable, we’re likely to see a huge increase in the number of APIs — public and private — over the coming years. Read more
The API space is ever-evolving. As the needs of end-users grow in both complexity and frequency, new software development strategies continue to emerge. When working with APIs, it’s not uncommon to see a network of systems handling a single purpose. In fact, during the modern age of microservice architectures, this has become the design paradigm de jure, with each API operating a small fraction of the much larger machine. Read more
Without a doubt, Application Programming Interfaces or APIs play a very important role in communication and data exchange between servers and services. From computers to smartphones and Internet of Things (IoT), applications talk and exchange info via APIs. Almost every day we use or interact with an API service, and many sites use a custom API to scale up their website. Read more
