API Driven Development

Slides from my CIConf 2012 talk on API Driven Development

Transcript

1. API DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT Or; Eating Your Own Dog Food
2. NICK JACKSON @jacksonj04
4. APIS HAVE MADE US: • Smarter • More Responsive • Faster • Better at what we do • Produce a better user experience
5. IN TODAY’S LECTURE... • What is an API? • How can I use it to drive development? • Why should I care? • How CodeIgniter made it easy.
6. WHAT IS AN API? A Really Quick Introduction
10. DRIVEN BY APIS Planning For The Win
11. Fancy Web Service NOW WITH AN API!!!*
12. We Have An API!* ❖ API only available on Triple Platinum Plus plan. ❖ API allows reading of content only, not creation, modification or deletion. ❖ API will not be kept up to date with new changes. ❖ No support or documentation is available for API. ❖ API may randomly stop working, and we won’t really care about fixing it for you. After all, it’s not important.
13. Database Application User
14. 3rd Party Application User API Database Application User
15. THE SOLUTION?
16. Database API
17. 3rd Party Application User Application User Database API
18. EAT YOUR OWN DOG FOOD
19. YAY FOR APIS! But why should I care?
20. ARCHITECTURE IS BETTER • Forced to think about data types and methods early on. • Consistent behaviour across application is easier to achieve.
21. DEVELOPMENT IS EASIER • Calling a well designed API is simple. • Error messages become cleanly captured by design. • APIs encourage code reuse at both API and application end.
22. UPDATES BECOME SIMPLER • Run two or more API versions concurrently. • Tweak API backend and all frontends (‘official’ and 3rd party) benefit at once.
23. YOUR API WILL BE BETTER • API must include everything you want your application to be able to do. • Reliability of API is now critical. • Documentation is better.
24. SO WHAT OF CODEIGNITER? Why CodeIgniter already has you thinking the right way
25. View Model Controller
26. API Model Controller View API Controller
27. HELPFUL OUT OF THE BOX • PHP is built to work in a web environment, so functions to GET, POST etc are really simple. • Output class has caching, media types and so-on. • Upcoming in v3: Unit testing (and other goodies)
28. LIBRARIES AND EXTENDABILITY • Awesome libraries out there already. • Many, many tutorials out there already. • Google it, try “CodeIgniter REST / OAuth / API” etc. • Really easy to extend output class to do custom API stuff.