The podcast discusses the process of writing patterns for API design, including the motivation behind the book and the challenges of collaborative writing. They also explore the transition from website to book and the importance of hands-on experience. Other topics include pattern mining and naming, book refinement, and writing books during lockdown.
Patterns in API design help improve quality attributes, scalability, performance, and maintainability.
The pagination pattern provides performant alternatives for handling large result sets, while the context representation pattern addresses metadata transmission in API requests.
Deep dives
The Book: Patterns for API Design
Patterns for API Design is a new book authored by Daniel Lubeke and a team of co-authors. The book focuses on capturing API design experience and providing a neutral, technology-agnostic approach to solving common API design problems.
The Importance of Patterns
Patterns in API design are essential as they capture experience and provide tried-and-tested solutions. Patterns help improve quality attributes, scalability, performance, and maintainability. They serve as a checklist and a guide for making conscious design choices.
Key Patterns: Pagination and Context Representation
Two standout patterns identified in the book are pagination and context representation. The pagination pattern discusses the different variants for handling large result sets, providing more performant alternatives to traditional approaches. The context representation pattern focuses on transmitting metadata in API requests, addressing issues related to message IDs, correlation, and traceability.
Takeaways and Advice
The book emphasizes the importance of using patterns that are relevant to your specific context, rather than using all patterns. It encourages readers to familiarize themselves with the patterns and use them as a checklist during API design. The authors also offer training options and can be contacted for further assistance.
With several great books on API design already on our shelves, this one stands out as a hefty pattern language and catalog for API designers. It's chock full of about everything you could need to design an industrial-strength API. Our discussion steps through the pattern writing process, including working as a team of five industry and academic professionals. Learn insights from one of the book's co-authors and pattern writers—a software industry practitioner—including his favorite and most challenging pattern in the book.
Daniel Lübke is a Software and Business Process Architect working at Digital Solution Architecture GmbH in Hanover, Germany. He received his PhD in Software Engineering in 2007. Since then he is working as a consulting and coding software architect in client projects. He is one of the contributors to the API Pattern collection, author and editor of several books and other publications, and is frequently sharing his experience in conference talks and lectures.