Some people don't know whether they should create specialized API, things that work for certain use cases only or for certain customers only. I want to lead this to the interface segregation principle and it's hard. What I would recommend is to look at what use cases you have in general,. Then to check whether there is a certain amount of like two, three operations which would more or less cover these well. But as a rule of thumb, I would probably just after having three different specialized operations rather than going down the rabbit hole into GraphQL.
“A good API doesn’t expose the internal data models or internal logic too much. And the more your clients are not under your control, the less you want to do that."
Daniel Luebke is a software architect and the co-author of “Patterns for API Design”. In this episode, we discussed some API design patterns and best practices taken from his book. Daniel first shared the importance of understanding domain requirements for building APIs and several API and message best practices, such as API first design, how to design loosely coupled message exchanges, the tradeoff between generic and specialized API operations, and the risk of exposing too much internal data model and logic in our APIs. Daniel also introduced the microservices domain-specific languages (MSDL) as an alternative to Open API for specifying APIs independent of the technology implementation. Towards the end, Daniel explained the importance of defining the API lifecycle, how to support backward compatibility, and the different API versioning strategies we can use to evolve our APIs.
Listen out for:
- Career Journey - [00:04:17]
- Writing API Design Book - [00:08:26]
- Loosely Coupled Message Exchanges - [00:12:53]
- API Design Best Practices - [00:15:31]
- Message Best Practices - [00:20:48]
- Generic vs Specialized API - [00:24:51]
- Exposing Internal Data Model - [00:27:13]
- Microservices Domain-Specific Language - [00:30:37]
- API Evolution - [00:33:23]
- API Versioning - [00:39:27]
- 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:44:27]
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Daniel Luebke’s Bio
Daniel Lübke is an independent coding and consulting software architect with a focus on business process automation and digitization projects. His interests are software architecture, business process design, and system integration, which inherently require APIs to develop solutions. He received his PhD at the Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany, in 2007 and has worked in many industry projects in different domains since then. Daniel is author and editor of several books, articles, and research papers; gives training; and regularly presents at conferences on topics of APIs and software architecture.
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