API Developer Weekly – October 20, 2016 – Issue #133
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
Virtual Panel: Document and Description Formats for Web APIs
In this virtual panel we hear from 4 individuals deeply involved in the Web API space. Each of them has a unique take on the values, benefits, and costs of documentation and description formats in general, and provide their own unique perspective from their vantage points across the Web. [infoq.com]
Testing with HTTP Requests – via @codeship
A slow and unreliable test suite is a test suite developers won’t want to work on. In Part One of this series, I dove deeper into how you might organize classes and methods for dealing with HTTP calls. In this article, we’re going to dig into how to write tests that use data returned from external HTTP APIs. by Leigh Halliday [blog.codeship.com]
API Testing – Introducing behavior-driven development (BDD) to test APIs with DHC
In a previous blog post, we introduced the testing support of DHC. We described the power of this tool to test REST services and web APIs by combining requests and assertions. During the summer, a new version of DHC was released extending this testing support by providing a new dedicated view. by Thierry Templier [restlet.com]
Microservice Training
Learn how to define your domain, design your API interface, map your data, and deploy your service. Designed for individuals and teams. For a limited time the first 500 sign ups will get free Single Developer level training. by Ian Kelly [microservicetraining.com]
What Does it Mean to Monitor a Web API?
Without a doubt industry has embraced the necessity of providing programmatic Web API access to services along with (when appropriate) web interfaces. There are few systems today that aren’t making use of at least one Web API to outsource complex functionality like payments, mapping or notifications. by Christopher Young, @harledhes [apiful.io]
Ask HN: Rest api authorization
Make sure this REST api can be used just as easily using curl. I am not sure how to do this, as I dn’t think exposing API key is a good idea. I can ask clients to hash request params with api key, but that makes it non-trivial to use with curl. [news.ycombinator.com]
Video: No REST – Architecting Real-Time Bulk Async APIs
Michael Uzquiano talks about how to scale API to accept many items. He examines how to evolve the Evolution of ReST over HTTP to transactional, asynchronous bulk operations. He covers job descriptors, workers, the job queue and scaling workers across an API cluster elastically. [infoq.com]
Convert OpenAPI Spec to Slate / Shins Markdown API Docs
Someone turned me on to an OpenAPI Spec to Slate / Shins compatible markdown converter on Github this last week. I have been an advocate for making sure we are still using machine readable API definitions for our API documentation, even if we are deploying the more attractive Slate. [apievangelist.com]
Using JavaScript to Validate API Response Bodies
In prior posts, I’ve illustrated how API Science’s JavaScript validations capability can be used to validate API response timing versus data size, API HTTP response headers, and HTTP response status codes. What hasn’t yet been investigated is how you can use the API Science JavaScript validation facility to validate the API response body. by Kevin Farnham [apiscience.com]
REST API Notes for 2016/10/17 – Microservices Deep Cuts
Normally, in this newsletter, I like to quickly hit upon some valuable resources that bubbled up to my attention. But there’s a different class of work that takes longer to savor. However, with a bit of effort, these pieces yield tremendous insights. The first “deep cut” comes from Tom Killalea. [tinyletter.com]
APIStrat Boston 2016 – Nov 2-4
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. The preliminary schedule has been announced. [boston2016.apistrat.com]
Upcoming Web API Events
A list of upcoming Web API Events, maintained by Matthew Reinbold
The Business of APIs
API toolchain provider Postman raises $7m in Series A round
Postman, which has created an API testing and management suite, has announced that it has received $7 million in Series A financing from Nexus Venture Partners, a firm that invests in tech companies in the US and India. The funds will be used for ongoing development work and marketing. by Tas Bindi [zdnet.com]
Amazon Opens Beta For Alexa List Skills API
Amazon today announced the List Skills API, an addition to the Alexa Skills Kit that will let developers integrate Alexa within their own list applications. The goal here is to make it as easy as possible for people to add items to their lists by asking Alexa to do it for them. [programmableweb.com]
Thinking More About API Driven Conversational Interfaces
I am spending a lot of time thinking about conversational interfaces, and how APIs are driving the voice and bot layers of the space. While I am probably not as excited about Siri, Alexa and the waves of Slack bots being developed as everyone else, I am interested in the potential when it comes to some of the technology and business approaches behind them. [apievangelist.com]
(Un)Related Topics
So You’re Thinking of Decomposing Your Monolith into Microservices
Advocates for microservices tend to pitch the pattern as a remedy for bloated, messy, monolithic ailments. However, is the cost of transforming a monolith into a series of microservices worth it? There are arguments for the merits and sins of each, but what about microservices attracts so many companies and developers? by Taylor Jones [blog.codeship.com]
Stream Processing and Lambda Architecture Challenges
Lambda architecture has been a popular solution that combines batch and stream processing. Kartik Paramasivam at LinkedIn wrote about how his team addressed stream processing and Lambda architecture challenges using Apache Samza for data processing. The challenges described are the late arrival of events and the processing of duplicated messages. [infoq.com]
Building A Serverless Screenshot Service with Lambda
A client recently requested a feature involving screenshots of random URLs. Now, there are several services out there that will do this for you. Most of these services have interesting REST APIs and pricing models, but I really wanted to develop something with Serverless. So I took this opportunity to check it out. by Serverless [medium.com]
The tale of two messaging platforms: Apache Kafka and Amazon Kinesis
Guest post by Parviz Deyhim, Data & Analytics Practice Lead, Datapipe Streaming data processing has become increasingly prevalent. As a result, different platforms and frameworks have been introduced to reduce the complexity. As Datapipe’s data and analytics consultants, we are frequently asked by customers to help pick the right solution for them. by AWS Startups [medium.com]
Transforming the Monolith at 20M tph
Summary Nick Beenham describes how the Enterprise Services Team at Comcast transformed from large monolithic deployments with cycle times of anything from 90 days to cycle times measured in hours. Nick Beenham is a Senior Principal Engineer at Comcast. He works within the Application and Platform Services organization and has been with Comcast for nine years. [infoq.com]
Say Cheese: a snapshot of the massive DDoS attacks coming from IoT cameras
Over the last few weeks we’ve seen DDoS attacks hitting our systems that show that attackers have switched to new, large methods of bringing down web applications. They appear to come from an IoT botnet (like Mirai and relations) which were responsible for the large attacks against Brian Krebs. Our [blog.cloudflare.com]
Want to share something?
As always, if you want to chat, share a link, or make a suggestion, feel free to drop us a quick note using Twitter (@launchany and @caseysoftware) or by emailing us at: james@launchany.com.