API Developer Weekly – August 18, 2016 – Issue #125
A hand-curated weekly newsletter for API developers, published with permission from LaunchAny and CaseySoftware.
Subscribe to their newsletter to stay updated on the latest API trends and industry news.
Hot Topics
API Lifecycle Governance Best Practices
The way a company builds APIs is a reflection of its organization. If a company is siloed, then the APIs produced by that company will be as equally fragmented; those items from one group will have little resemblance in form or function to the work produced from a different group. by Capital One Tech [medium.com]
Documenting APIs when Preferences Matter
I sat down to write a “Document APIs with Open API and JSON Schema” article. That’s still quite possible, of course, and there’s lots of great resources to help you do just that. by Benjamin Young [blog.codeship.com]
API Design: Building and Enforcing an Internal Style Guide
In our recent post on tips for starting a public API journey we touched briefly on the idea of creating a style guide that helps API providers produce well-constructed and consistent APIs as part of their public API offering. by Chris Wood [nordicapis.com]
REST API Cheat Sheet: Structure Constraints to Define or Design It Right
Representational State Transfer (REST) is a technical description of how the World Wide Web works. If to imagine that the Web is a device, and it could have an operating system, its architectural style would be REST. [api2cart.com]
gRPC with REST and OpenAPI Specification
Our guest post today comes from Brandon Phillips of CoreOS. CoreOS builds open source projects and products for Linux Containers. Their flagship products for consensus and discovery ( etcd) and their container engine rkt are early adopters gRPC, an RPC framework based on protobufs and HTTP/2, that can make building and consuming APIs easier and more performant. [openapis.org]
AWS Launches Application Load Balancer
Amazon has launched their Application Load Balancer (ALB), a new type of intelligent load balancer that promises to reduce the cost of load balancing for those running HTTP-based services. ALB is an OSI Layer 7 load balancer and can route to different back-end services based on the content of the packets. [infoq.com]
Where you Rate-Limit APIs Matters
article Seriously, let’s talk about this because architecture is a pretty important piece of the scalability puzzle. Rate limiting is not a new concept. We used to call it “quality of service” to make it sound nicer, but the reality is that when you limited bandwidth availability based on application port or protocol, you were rate limiting. [devcentral.f5.com]
API Gateway Custom Authorization With Lambda, DynamoDB, and CloudFormation
Build APIs from SQL and NoSQL data sources in seconds. Read the Creating REST APIs white paper, brought to you in partnership with CA Technologies. API Gateway provides an HTTP API endpoint that is fully configurable. You define the HTTP resources (like /user), the HTTP methods on that resources (like POST, GET, DELETE, etc.) [dzone.com]
Announcing wicked.haufe.io – Open Source API Portal
wicked.haufe.io [wicked.haufe.io]
Video: Introducing DHC by Restlet
Restlet provides an API PaaS for API design, API testing, API management and hosting. The cloud service helps developers (and non developers as well) manage, build APIs and test APIs that follow the REST API architecture. A web API built with Restlet’s API platform can be a data driven API, designed easily in few clicks through the user-friendly interface of APISpark. [restlet.com]
Rewrite Rewind: APIs Drive Startups, Financial Services & Security Risks – Rewrite
APIs are hot right now, with every industry looking to cash in on the development and innovation power they offer. From cloud startups to industry stalwarts to Pokemon Go, APIs are in the news. The Facebook of API Startups “API-first” startup Twilio is in the business of cloud-based, communication APIs. [ca.com]
APIStrat Boston 2016
APIStrat Boston – under the direction of our 2016 Program Chair Lorinda Brandon – is already shaping up to be our best program ever. Our three days of workshops, keynotes, fireside chats and speaker sessions 2016 reflect the maturity and diversity of the API business and community today. [boston2016.apistrat.com]
REST Fest – RESTful Web Services Unconference in Greenville, SC, USA – September 15 – 17, 2016
REST Fest is a unique blend of presentations and collaborative unconference goodness. The keynote sits directly in the middle of the conference schedule with hackday, workshop, session, talks, and 5-in-5 lightening talks surrounding it. [2016.restfest.org]
Upcoming Web API Events
A list of upcoming Web API Events, maintained by Matthew Reinbold
The Business of APIs
Adapt or Die: It’s Time To Go Big With APIs
General Electric, that icon of the industrial era, has committed to generating $15 billion in annual digital revenue by 2020. Pitney Bowes reports that new digital services already account for $1 billion in annual revenue-and the company is gunning for more. Nike built the world’s largest digital fitness community. [apigee.com]
APIs Are Breaking the Barriers to Smart Home Automation
Last year we hit a milestone. We’re not talking here about landmark deals on climate change or the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but rather that we passed the date that marked “the future” in Back To The Future II. by Art Anthony [nordicapis.com]
Instead of Just Discussing Via Phone You Should Publish Your API Goings On To Your Blog
I’m sure it can be frustrating for folks who just want to share the latest with me, but I hope you will understand that I am just a one man show, and I have to prioritize. [apievangelist.com]
Apigee and Pivotal Collaborate on Hybrid Cloud API Management
Pivotal’s cloud platform, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, now supports additional Apigee API management tooling focussed on hybrid (i.e. part public/part private) cloud support. While Apigee’s hybrid cloud management software, Edge Microgateway, was released last year, Cloud Foundry users can now utilize it within the Pivotal platform’s Apigee plugin. [infoq.com]
APIs are eating the world
A nice introduction to the importance of APIs by Simon Wood [speakerdeck.com]
(Un)Related Topics
Software Developers use Domain Driven Design to Drive Business
Increasingly, software developers have the ability to not only maintain and architect code, but extend their expertise to providing direction to the business. By using domain-driven-design (DDD), developers can discover customer behaviors and recommend practices that change the nature of the business. [infoq.com]
Video: Decoupled APIs through Microservices
Summary David Simons introduces microservices as a developer’s API tool, discussing why and when makes sense to use them, and the tools that make it easy to deal with a microservices architecture. David Simons is a freelance software consultant, working with companies (including the BBC and News International) to advice and deliver, by choosing and developing with the right tools for the job. [infoq.com]
Microservices with Vert.x – a match made in heaven | Hazelcast Blog
Saarth recently published a blog post entitled, “Microservices with Vert.x – a match made in heaven”. In the post you’ll learn how to set up a Microservices Architecture using Vert.x Microservices offer a more modern and concrete interpretation of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). [saarthblog.wordpress.com]
The Noms Database Aims to Become the Git of Shared Data
A new open source database called Noms aims to do for published data what Git does for source code. It’s from former Google engineers Aaron Boodman and Rafael Weinstein, who formed the company Attic Labs. They set out to build a database with versioning, deduplication, and synchronization built into its core. by Susan Hall, Nick McCrory [thenewstack.io]
Observing your web app
TL;DR: a dozen+ examples of monitoring changes in a web application. The web has lots of APIs for knowing what’s going on in your app. You can monitor mucho stuff and observe just about any type of change. by ericbidelman [ericbidelman.tumblr.com]
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