Online APIs: Doing it Right

Open APIs are hard to do. Here's a company that will teach you how to get there.

I've been working in the SDK and APIs industry for the past decade and then some. In the last several years, there is a strong trend of offering APIs as part of hosted services as well – something that offers developers a way to mash up what they are doing. If you are a developer, and you are focused on mobile, you need to know the server side of the story as well. And there is no better way of doing that than Apigee's blog and resources.

Apigee is all about APIs. They provide a rich set of products, but the most interesting one is their enterprise offering, where they provide the full set of services and features necessary when offering APIs to customers: community portal, analytics, security, scaling, rate limiting, caching, low latency and much more.

What I want to focus is not their company and products, but rather the resources that they have for developers – something that is priceless.

The blog

Apigee has a top notch blog. They discuss in it a lot of aspects related to providing APIs as well as a lot of other things that they raise there.

Debating on how to provide your API responses? XML or JSON? How about both? Apigee has a post exactly about that – supporting multiple response formats in your APIs. There are a lot more there. Just subscribe to their blog and wait for the learning to happen.

The whitepaper

Apigee has a very interesting whitepaper called Is Your API Naked. It is the best thing you will be reading about open APIs. It covers all bases on what such APIs mean and what you probably forgot to think about when you started designing yours. I know it has made me think of the things we were missing at the time.

The group

If you are the learning kind who is also looking to see discussions and join them, then they have a Google group for that as well. The group is called API Craft. There are a lot of interesting discussions there – questions raised by developers about their APIs and how they should tackle the design problems they face.

Need more?

Apigee has a great resource page where they have placed their whole set of resources. It is a good starting point to both understanding APIs and to understanding if and how Apigee can assist you.

Make a point of subscribing to their blog – at least for a while – there is much to learn there.