Designing mobile friendly APIs

Slides from the talk I gave at 1st HTTP API group meetup in Berlin.

Transcript

1. Mobile friendly APIs Milan Cermak HTTP API Meetup Group Berlin Feb 13, 2014
2. General rules
3. be religious about documentation
4. when in doubt RFC 2616
5. Designing for mobile
6. Optimize for size and speed
7. • Bytes matter • Power consumption: • 3G > wifi > 2G • On cellular, only 2 concurrent networking requests
8. Content-Encoding: gzip
9. ETag If-Match If-None-Match
10. Make the API flexible
11. Make the API flexible • fields parameter
12. GET /people/1! {“id”: 1,! “name”: “Milan Cermak”,! “age”: 27,! “hobbies”: [“programming”, “ice cream”],! ...! }
13. GET /people/1?fields=name,age! {“name”: “Milan Cermak”,! “age”: 27}
14. Minimal vs. full approach ! • Send only the minimal possible representation, let the users specify what they want via fields! • Send the full available representation of the resource
15. Make the API flexible • zoom parameter
16. GET /hobbies/programming! {“people”: [“1”, “2”, “3”, “5”, “8”, “11”],! “popularity”: 0.75,! ...! }
17. GET /hobbies/programming?zoom=people! {“people”: [! {“id”: 1,! “name”: “Milan Cermak”,! “age”: 27! ...! },! ...]! }
18. Batched requests
19. Batched requests • i.e. Facebook Graph API • A solution until widespread adoption of HTTP2 • Not really RESTful, but really useful
20. POST /api/batch! {[! {“method”: “GET”! “relative_url”: “people/1”! },! {“method”: “GET”,! “relative_url”: “hobbies/dogs”! }! ]}
21. Batched requests • Server-side implementation can be tricky: • Error handling • HTTP headers • Parallel execution vs. POST/PUT/DELETE
22. Thank you