API Driven Development - Speaker Deck

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API DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT Or; Eating Your Own Dog Food

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NICK JACKSON @jacksonj04

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APIS HAVE MADE US: • Smarter • More Responsive • Faster • Better at what we do • Produce a better user experience

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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.

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WHAT IS AN API? A Really Quick Introduction

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DRIVEN BY APIS Planning For The Win

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Fancy Web Service NOW WITH AN API!!!*

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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.

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Database Application User

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3rd Party Application User API Database Application User

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THE SOLUTION?

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Database API

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3rd Party Application User Application User Database API

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EAT YOUR OWN DOG FOOD

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YAY FOR APIS! But why should I care?

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ARCHITECTURE IS BETTER • Forced to think about data types and methods early on. • Consistent behaviour across application is easier to achieve.

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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.

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UPDATES BECOME SIMPLER • Run two or more API versions concurrently. • Tweak API backend and all frontends (‘ofﬁcial’ and 3rd party) beneﬁt at once.

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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.

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SO WHAT OF CODEIGNITER? Why CodeIgniter already has you thinking the right way

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View Model Controller

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API Model Controller View API Controller

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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)

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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.