Great APIs

My lightning talk on one aspect of what I think makes a great API. Given at IPRUG lightning talks, and later at a work event.

Transcript

1. Great APIs @ChrisSinjo IPRUG – 05/03/2013
2. A piece of a larger talk
3. Caution: Opinions ahead
4. What is “great”? Nice high level APIs Powerful, underlying toolset Spend most time here Go here when I’m doing something awesome
5. Git calls this “porcelain” and “plumbing”
6. Example: get something over HTTP
7. In my mind (psuedocode) # Gives me the response contents as a string print HttpLibrary.get('http://ifconfig.me/ip').body
8. In Ruby (with HTTParty) puts HTTParty.get('http://ifconfig.me/ip').body
9. Caution: Serious, heavy-duty, enterprise language for people with beards ahead
10. In Java (with commonly recommended HttpClient) HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient(); HttpGet httpget = new HttpGet("http://ifconfig.me/ip"); HttpResponse response = httpclient.execute(httpget); HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity(); if (entity != null) { InputStream myIpStream = entity.getContent(); try { BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader( new InputStreamReader(myIpStream, Charset.forName("UTF-8"))); String nextLine; while ((nextLine = reader.readLine()) != null) { System.out.println(nextLine); } } finally { myIpStream.close(); } }
11. In Java (with fluent-hc wrapper) String ip = Request.Get("http://ifconfig.me/ip") .execute().returnContent().asString(); System.out.println(ip);
12. This isn’t a language thing At least not entirely (syntactic flexibility aside)
13. Community focus? Broadly: Java: ↑ plumbing Ruby: ↑ porcelain
14. There is more to great APIs than this
15. Questions?