Pro RESTful APIs

APIs are not new. They’ve served as interfaces that enable applications to communicate with each other for decades. But the role of APIs has changed dramatically in the last few years. Innovative companies have discovered that APIs can be used as an interface to the business, allowing them to monetize digital assets, extend their value proposition with partner-delivered capabilities, and connect to customers across channels and devices. When you create an API, you are allowing others within or outside of your organization to make use of your service or product to create new applications, attract customers, or expand their business. Internal APIs enhance the productivity of development teams by maximizing reusability and enforcing consistency in new applications. Public APIs can add value to your business by allowing third party developers to enhance your services or bring their customers to you. As developers find new applications for your services and data, a network effect occurs, delivering significant bottom-line business impact. For example, Expedia opened up their travel booking services to partners through an API to launch the Expedia Affiliate Network, building a new revenue stream that now contributes $2B in annual revenue. Salesforce released APIs to enable partners to extend the capabilities of their platform and now generates half of their annual revenue through those APIs, which could be SOAP-based (JAX-WS) and, more recently, RESTful (JAX-RS).

This chapter starts with API design strategies and then goes into API creation process and modeling. Best practices for REST API design are discussed, followed by API solution architecture. In the excercises, a simple API is designed for podcasts suscription and then modeling using RAML.

This chapter introduces basic concepts about XML and JSON. At the end of this chapter there is an exercise for environment setup.

This chapter introduces basic concepts about JAX-RS. At the end there are exercises using XML and JSON representations with JAX-RS.

This chapter starts with API Portfolio Architecture and then gets into framework for API development. An overview of API framework starting from client to data is discussed and then focus is shifted to review services layer with an exercise implementing services layer.

This chapter starts with API Platform Architecture and then gets into data handler pattern for integration of RESTful APIs with actual data sources within enterprise to make it more meaningful to the consumers through APIs.

In this chapter we will start with Façade and review API Management requirements/solutions available.

In this chapter we will start with the review of the oAuth 2 standard for securing RESTful APIs and do an exercise on implementing basic spring security. We will then review caching concepts.