REST API Notes for 2018/05/09
When I first introduced the 'Milestones' section to the newsletter, it was a way to acknowledge big, newsworthy industry events that kinda/sorta weren't guidance. Over time, it has become a catch-all for all the news I couldn't quite work into narrative but still seemed important.
Fast forward to this week's update, and there's more word count in the milestones than in the regular posts! Do you find these mentions valuable? Let me know.
Before we get to milestones, however, let's cover the most recent crop of mentionables:
NOTES
EVOLVING AN API WITHOUT BREAKING IT
When it comes to versioning, many advice-dealers (myself included) chastise people to avoid it. When pressed, we might mutter something about evolvability and handwave before disappearing in a cloud of hypermedia smoke.
Phil Sturgeon, however, has gone the distance and published an excellent, practical guild for evolving an API without breaking clients. There's a heavy emphasis on the provider of the API accommodating change. As Phil implies, it isn't easy. However, an API provider going through the rigor once can save an order of effort magnitude on the part of consumers.
Highly recommended.
PROGNOSTICATION ON THE CURRENT AND FUTURE STATE OF MICROSERVICES
The API Academy's Matt McLarty has a piece up on DZone on the current and future state of microservices. I agree that service discovery and container orchestration remain major concerns of a microservice approach. I, also, continue to see organization make the mistake of declaring that "everything needs to be a microservice". Treating any approach, microservice or not, as a silver bullet will result in sub-optimal results. Choose your microservice battles wisely.
INTRODUCTION TO API TESTING
Sarah Elson has a recent medium post titled "Everything You Need to Know about API Testing. The piece serves as a gentle introduction to the need for dedicated API testing, along with explaining where it sits among other techniques.
If your currently go-to-market test plan only consists of integration testing (or, heaven forbid, five minutes of poking around in an interface), give the piece a few minutes.
MILESTONES
Lots of items this week. Let's do these, rapid-fire:
- API City Conference, in Seattle, has a Call for Papers! The CFP is open till May 31st.
- Gartner released its Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management. I don't think there are many surprises here, but a good overview of the options available.
- Kai Todter released the "HAL Explorer", a hypermedia explorer. I have a todo to come back and spend some time playing with this.
- Lots of keynotes and announcements from technology's biggest players in recent weeks. For example, Facebook Launched its Graph API 3.0.
- Similarly, Google Maps is ending keyless usage. Logical, but still a bummer for folks that just wanted to throw a quick, high-quality map on a page without filling in credit card details.
- Sam Newman has a new microservices course available from O'Reilly, focusing on 'serverless fundamentals'.
- There's an updated draft for the Sunset header by Erik Wilde. It has additional information about implementations.
WRAPPING UP
It's probably about time for me to take a sweep through Meetup.com for events to add to webapi.events. Do you know of an in-person gathering that should be shared with the world? Let me know - either respond to this note directly or send me an email at 'hello@matthewreinbold.com'.
Also, on a personal note, I've been tweaking details on my personal site, https://matthewreinbold.com.
Til next time,
Matthew