How do you develop APIs that meet industry standards?

Podemos dizer que quando uma API adere aos princípios do REST, ela se beneficia de uma interface padronizada e previsível, o que facilita a compreens?o e a utiliza??o por parte dos desenvolvedores. No entanto, a n?o conformidade com as boas práticas do REST pode levar a alguns efeitos negativos: ? nomes de endpoints n?o descritivos podem tornar difícil para os desenvolvedores entenderem a finalidade de cada recurso, resultando em confus?o e erros de implementa??o; ? uma estrutura de URIs n?o hierárquica pode tornar a navega??o na API complicada e propensa a erros; ? o uso inconsistente de verbos HTTP para opera??es CRUD pode levar a ambiguidades e comportamentos inesperados, dificultando a previsibilidade e a confiabilidade da API.

Algo que contribui para o projeto da API e que vejo de forma constante, é ter experiências anteriores relacionadas ao contexto que a API será criada. Essas experiências ad-hoc podem contribuir para que você melhor entenda quando e como certas funcionalidades podem ser oferecidas e usadas. Mapeamento essas necessidades e identificando uma família de casos que precisem delas, poderá lhe dar mais seguran?a no desenvolvimento de uma API que atenda algo que foi identificado em mais de um sistema, por exemplo, desenvolvido por você.

Before coding, It's crucial to design your API with a clear vision. Here are the key points: 1) Define its scope, functionality, and target audience. 2) Choose an architectural style like REST, GraphQL, or gRPC. Ensure consistency, intuitiveness, and adherence to standards for a user-friendly experience. 3) Additionally, consider scalability and future maintenance needs to create a robust sustainable API solution. 4) Regularly gather feedback from users to to iterate and improve the design as needed

Clean architecture and Onion architecture patterns have proven time and time again to be excellent for scalability of APIs in the long run. Although they have a high investment cost for its initial inception, the solution is super effective and provides low cost when it enters the Maintenance stages due to how much the architecture patterns respect the SOLID principles and separation of concerns. Also, during its maintenance stages, the Business layers are rarely touched, providing more effectiveness on code affected by making modifications at the implementation level only.

Follow Contract First approach when designing your API. Define what kind of data will be exhanged and what data format should be used. When designing the endpoints, focus on the businesses functionalities. In other words - design while thinking in domains. DDD is your friend here.

To document your API effectively, use standardized formats like OpenAPI or RAML to cover essential components such as endpoints, parameters, responses, and authentication. Additionally: 1) Provide clear examples of references to help understanding and integration by developers. 2) Ensure each section is concise yet comprehensive, offering detailed information on API interaction, error handling, and authentication. 3) Regularly update the documentation to reflect any changes or enhancements to the API, maintaining its accuracy and usefulness over time. 4) Solicit feedback from users to identify areas for improvement and refine documentation accordingly, ensuring it remains a valuable resource for developers integrating with your API

Ensuring the reliability and functionality of your API involves a multi-faceted testing approach: 1) Incorporate methods like unit testing to validate individual components, integration testing to assess interactions between components, and functional testing to verify the API's behavior against requirements. 2) Additionally, conduct load testing to assess performance under expected and peak loads, and security testing to uncover vulnerabilities and ensure data integrity. 3) Automation of these tests enhances efficiency and allows for continuous monitoring, enabling timely bug fixes and optimizations for a robust and dependable API.

Functional Testing & Performance Testing Functional Testing involves effectively testing all the cases that can occur in your use case. Test APIs thoroughly to identify any bugs or issues. Performance testing involves assessing the number of parallel threads and users the API can handle simultaneously. This, as a whole, benchmarks the API and provides solid outputs. You can use Postman as it offers both Functional and Performance Testing readily available; however, it could be subscription-based. Additionally, you can integrate Postman into your CI/CD pipeline or schedule tests to run each morning and receive error reports automatically.

Inspirada nas práticas do Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) desenvolvidas pela Google, a observabilidade enfatiza a capacidade de entender e depurar sistemas complexos por meio da coleta e análise de dados de telemetria, registros e rastreamentos, onde, ao adotar práticas de observabilidade, as equipes de desenvolvimento podem identificar rapidamente problemas de desempenho, latência ou disponibilidade em suas APIs e tomar medidas corretivas proativas. Isso n?o apenas ajuda a garantir que a API atenda aos padr?es de confiabilidade exigidos pelo setor, mas também permite uma resposta mais ágil a eventuais problemas, aumentando a satisfa??o do usuário e a reputa??o do produto no mercado.

Use software frameworks like Spring to build your API. That helps with handling most scenarios that’s known to date I also found that splitting your APIs architecture to layers is very useful. For example, experience, process, and system layers and helps with standardisation.