APIs are a powerful way to integrate third-party functions, connect corporate systems, and enable data exchange between applications. But did you know that a well-managed API management can bring more value to your product? I summed up here what we have learnt ourselves before you start designing your own API on the basis of some passionate exchanges between back-end developers in an ecom project.
API planning and design
In order to make your product using an interface by API more attractive for the market, it is worth doing some preliminary work and taking several factors into account.
Market and audience research. Determine your target audience and their needs in terms of API. For that, research the market to find out what existing APIs already offer and how many users use them. Also, analyse what solutions are already used by your direct competitors and what users’ problems they solve. You may even contact competitors’ API users in forums to better understand their frustrations and their needs. Then, think about how to improve your own API offering or create something new.
Determine the needs and goals of API users. Understanding the goals and needs of your users really is the basis for creating a successful API. Ask yourself: What tasks will the users use your API for? What features are important to them? This will help formulate the goals of creation and determine the main functions of the API.
Decide on your API type. The architectural style you choose for your API affects how developers will interact with your product:
- RESTful APIs are based on HTTP standards and are suitable for systems where scalability is important and operations can be easily represented as requests and responses.
- SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) provides a more structured connectivity and security. It is used for transactions where high reliability and standardisation are necessary, especially for highly controlled environments, such as authentication.
- GraphQL allows clients to define exactly what data they need, reducing redundancy and improving query performance
Thinking of API functions and methods. Determine what operations your API should support: reading data, modifying it, deleting it, or creating new records. Describe each operation in terms of inputs, outputs, and expected results. This will help your own developers create your API the proper way, and the API consumers understand and use your API easily.
Security is a critical part of design. Make sure your API is protected from common threats by planning for authentication (verifies who can access the API), the authorization (what actions a user can perform after authentication) and encryption of API data.
API Development
Creating an interface includes choosing technologies, taking into account non-functional requirements, setting up versioning and preparing clear documentation.
Selection of technologies and frameworks for API development. The choice depends on the programming language, team preferences, and specific project requirements. Frameworks often used for web APIs are Express for Node.js, Django and Flask for Python, or Ruby on Rails for Ruby. Mobile APIs will require specialized solutions based on iOS and Android.
Non-functional requirements (NFR) are important to ensure the quality and stability of the API in term of reliability (the API must process requests correctly even under load) and scalability (must support growth in the number of users and data volumes without loss of performance) .
API version management. This system is critical to maintaining compatibility with older versions and making improvements without breaking client applications. It is recommended to use semantic versioning (for example, v1, v2, v3) to clearly separate changes to the API.
API Documentation. Good documentation helps developers easily understand and use your API. If the documentation is poorly described, people will give up trying to understand it, and you will lose customers of your product. Additionally, your technical support will be flooded with questions. We used Swagger to automatically generate interactive documentation so that developers can test APIs directly from the browser. Another popular API tool, Postman , allows you to create and save queries for API testing and can complement documentation by providing practical use cases. When developing a public API, it is a good practice to provide documentation with examples of standard scenarios, SDKs, and tutorials.
API Testing is an important stage in ensuring the reliability and security of the developed API. Let’s look at the main types:
- Unit tests – test individual functions or methods to ensure that each individual component works as intended.
- Integration tests – check the interaction between different components or between the API and other external systems. This helps ensure that all parts of the system work correctly together.
- Load tests – test the API’s ability to cope with a large volume of requests, which is important for determining performance and scalability.
Deploying and monitoring. Due to its reliability and cost effectiveness for IT infrastructure, it is common practice to deploy your API with containers in cloud providers such as AWS, GPC or MS Azure. There it is easy to be monitored and maintained with specialized monitoring tools (we used Prometheus and Grafana. This allowed us to quickly detect and fix emerging problems.
Community management
Building an active and engaged developer community will greatly increase the popularity of your API. For example, create online platforms where developers can connect, share ideas, suggest new features and reveal bugs and help each other. This strengthens relationships and promotes product loyalty. Other ideas I have read about (although not seen myself), develop incentive programs: Reward active users for contributing to the community, such as creating tutorials, answering other users’ questions, or publishing code. If used widely, community management is the best way for making users promote your product through the grapevine.
Instead of creating a product, which integrates like a black box, and, in case of questions, the support tells you the problem is at your side, the best API players (Google, AWS, Expedia, Salesforce…) show the trends for managing API. So, when designing an API, it is worth taking into account not only the immediate needs, but also making sure the API brings value alongside your product and fits into your product strategy.