What are things you look for in a great API?
I’d love to hear your thoughts on various aspects like a spec, e.g. OpenAPI, where you think is a great place to host your API, resilience, handling errors, observability, testing etc.
If you have examples of great APIs even better! And if you have recommendations for tools to help with your awesome API share those as well.
I’m curious to see people’s stacks and tools!
Top comments (8)
Proper JSON types, for instance:
A great documentation, good routes and makes that simple to access data's.
Easy to remove datas about GDPR.
Yup, documentation is the key. Also, semantic routing which makes any url endpoint readable and helps to figure it out intuitively.
I like to joke with my backend colleagues: 'A great API makes the frontend stupid.'
For example:
What I need most is to trust an API to do precisely what it is supposed to do; no more and no less. For that, I need for every API-call:
There are other desirable features, but these four trump all others.
Thanks a lot!
I just wrote an article on How to design good API. Not only REST API, but any kind of API:
kissyagni.wordpress.com/2023/07/28...
I would summarize it by:
API is the UX of your service. Whatever the complexity of what you are doing, API should be easy and intuitive for end user. And writing documentation is not an excuse for badly designed API.
That's it for now. Maybe will remember other cases if lucky;)