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Presentation from The Highland Fling conference on things to understand when designing APIs along with a few design guidelines.
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A First Class Web Citizen
Gareth Rushgrove | morethanseven.net
Some People Use Browsers
Gareth Rushgrove | morethanseven.net
Some People Don’t Use Browsers
Gareth Rushgrove | morethanseven.net
urllib.urlopen('http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml').read
Some People Aren't People, They're Robots
Gareth Rushgrove | morethanseven.net
And Not Everything Is a Website
Gareth Rushgrove | morethanseven.net
The Web Is On Your Desktop Too
Gareth Rushgrove | morethanseven.net
And Sometimes It’s a Rabbit...
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...Sort Of
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What Is A Designer To Do?
Gareth Rushgrove | morethanseven.net
Understand The Web As A Platform
Gareth Rushgrove | morethanseven.net
1
Native To A Web Of Data
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“An aggregate web of connected data sources and services
Tom Coates
A Semantic Web?
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“The Semantic Web is the application of weblike design to data
Tim Berners-Lee
Websites Talking To Websites
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“Mashups are the most interesting innovation in software development in 20 years
Douglas Crockford
APIs As User Interfaces
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“The API is the product Todd Sampson
2Understand HTTP
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Methods You Know
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GET, POST
Sample GET Request
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GET /index.html HTTP/1.1Host: www.example.com
Sample Response
Gareth Rushgrove | morethanseven.net
HTTP/1.1 200 OKDate: Mon, 23 May 2005 22:38:34 GMTServer: Apache/1.3.3.7 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux)Last-Modified: Wed, 08 Jan 2003 23:11:55 GMTEtag: "3f80f-1b6-3e1cb03b"Accept-Ranges: bytesContent-Length: 438Connection: closeContent-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Methods You Don’t
Gareth Rushgrove | morethanseven.net
HEAD, PUT, DELETE, TRACE, OPTIONS
Everyone knows 404 Not Found
Gareth Rushgrove | morethanseven.net
And Maybe 500 Internal Server Error
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But What About 200 Found
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Or 503 Service Unavailable
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Applications
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3Understand URLs
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The Webs Coordinates
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“The Web is an information space. Human
Dan Connolly
beings have a lot of mental machinery for manipulating, imagining, and finding their way in spaces. URIs are the points in that space
URL Design
Gareth Rushgrove | morethanseven.net
“What, design a URI? I have to design URIs? Yes, you have to think about it
Tim Berners-Lee
Good or Bad?
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http://flickr.com/photos
http://del.icio.us/tag/highlandfling
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/eng_prem/7309369.stm
http://musicbrainz.org/ws/1/artist
Framework Of Choice
Gareth Rushgrove | morethanseven.net
from django.conf.urls.defaults import *
urlpatterns = patterns('', (r'^articles/2003/$', 'news.views.special_case_2003'), (r'^articles/(\d{4})/$', 'news.views.year'), (r'^articles/(\d{4})/(\d{2})/$', 'news.views.month'), (r'^articles/(\d{4})/(\d{2})/(\d+)/$', 'news.views.article'),)
Designing Good APIs
Gareth Rushgrove | morethanseven.net
Prodable
Gareth Rushgrove | morethanseven.net
1
Curl == Stick
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curl --get http://musicbrainz.org/ws/1/artist/ -d type=xml -d query="delgados"
A Response
Gareth Rushgrove | morethanseven.net
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><metadata xmlns="http://musicbrainz.org/ns/mmd-1.0#" xmlns:ext="http://musicbrainz.org/ns/ext-1.0#"> <artist-list count="1" offset="0"> <artist id="d629843e-d2b9-4665-a203-19f9c7f811ef" type="Group" ext:score="100"> <name>The Delgados</name> <sort-name>Delgados, The</sort-name> <life-span begin="1995" end="2005-04"/> </artist> </artist-list></metadata>
2Hackable
Gareth Rushgrove | morethanseven.net
A Simple Trick
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Tada!
Gareth Rushgrove | morethanseven.net
Variables In URLs
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http://twitter.com/{username}
3Multilingual
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Open
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4
Fire Eagle and Dopplr
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5Transparent
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Can Your Website Be Your API?
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What About Other Websites?
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6Obvious
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Understand
Gareth Rushgrove | morethanseven.net
2. HTTP
3. URLs
1. The Web As A Platform
Make Your API
6. Obvious
Gareth Rushgrove | morethanseven.net
4. Open
2. Hackable
3. Multilingual
1. Prodable
5. Transparent
Thanks flickr
Gareth Rushgrove | morethanseven.net
flickr.com/photos/stoweboyd/2350135191/
flickr.com/photos/sjaek/275710273/
flickr.com/photos/lkfdesign/365335459/
flickr.com/photos/mn_francis/418495671/
flickr.com/photos/tripu/267155109/
flickr.com/photos/jessefriedman/1435220149/
flickr.com/photos/sanbeiji/1821188052/
flickr.com/photos/lwr/2276706021/
flickr.com/photos/brocktice/1444774312/
flickr.com/photos/qwirksilver/104266807/
flickr.com/photos/deapeajay/2267569368/
flickr.com/photos/queen_of_subtle/461631577/
flickr.com/photos/wongjunhao/2189540204/
flickr.com/photos/warhead/2053343/
flickr.com/photos/stoweboyd/2350976688/
End
Gareth Rushgrove | morethanseven.net
