API Survival

Very minimal slide deck, basically the diagrams to go with my FOWA tutorial

Transcript

1. API Survival Kit Lorna Mitchell, FOWA 2015
2. The (Vague) Plan • Meet and greet new APIs • Inspecting traffic and debugging APIs • Webhooks and publishing local services remotely • Tools for API publishers
3. Today's Resources These slides and some (updating) reference material: http://lornajane.net/resources/
4. Finding APIs Search! • Directories such as http://www.programmableweb.com/apis/directory • There's an apis.json search tool http://apis.io/about
5. Documentation Look for overview documentation. What do you look for when you read API documentation for the first time?
6. Tools for First Contact • curl http://curl.haxx.se/ • httpie https://github.com/jkbrzt/httpie (python) • Postman https://www.getpostman.com/ (Chrome app)
7. Token-based Authentication This approach allows: • restrictable access • revokable tokens
8. OAuth 2 OAuth is designed for the relationship between: • a User • a "Provider" who already has a relationship with the user and the user's data - e.g. Facebook • a "Consumer" whom the User would like to have access to some of their data stored with the provider - e.g. Mobile app
9. OAuth 2 OAuth 2 (rather than the original OAuth 1) recognises trust Supports various ways of granting access Full spec: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6749
10. Authorization Code Grant
11. Owner Creds Grant
12. OAuth in Action
13. Challenge: Meet an API Talk to an API successfully using a tool of your choice.
14. Challenge: Meet an API Make an authenticated call to an API successfully using a tool of your choice.
15. Tools for Inspecting Traffic Tools used in this section: • Charles Proxy: http://www.charlesproxy.com/ • mitmproxy: http://mitmproxy.org/ Browsers all have their own tools • Firefox has firebug http://getfirebug.com/ • Chrome and IE dev tools installed by default
16. API Backend, Web Frontend
17. API Backend, Web Frontend
18. Exercise http://www.w3schools.com/ajax/ajax_example.asp <-- go here and inspect the ajax calls, headers and body. Repeat the call. "Try it yourself" button, lets you edit the JS if you are so minded.
19. Sample endpoints When testing API tools you may find it helpful to use some of the ready-made endpoints: • http://httpbin.org/ • http://requestb.in/ • http://httpresponder.com/
20. Webhooks
21. Webhooks
22. Webhooks
23. Webhooks
24. Webhooks
25. Questions? (feel free to email later lorna@lornajane.net)