Patterns for API Design

In Patterns for API Design: Simplifying Integration with Loosely Coupled Message Exchanges, five expert architects and developers cover the entire API lifecycle, from launching projects and establishing goals through defining requirements, elaborating designs, planning evolution, and creating useful documentation. They crystallize the collective knowledge of many practitioners into 44 API design patterns, consistently explained with context, pros and cons, conceptual solutions, and concrete examples. To make their pattern language accessible, they present a domain model, a running case study, decision narratives with pattern selection options and criteria, and walkthroughs of real-world projects applying the patterns in two different industries.

• Identify and overcome API design challenges with patterns
• Size your endpoint types and operations adequately
• Design request and response messages and their representations
• Refine your message design for quality
• Plan to evolve your APIs
• Document and communicate your API contracts
• Combine patterns to solve real-world problems and make the right tradeoffs