Designing mobile friendly APIs

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