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General Guidelines

This section outlines the general guidelines for the architecture and documentation standards that all APIs at VA should follow.

We recommend established industry API standards. While developing APIs for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the government presents unique challenges, providers can leverage API guidelines honed in the open source community and the private sector. Not all consumers will be familiar with the VA API landscape. Following industry standards and best practices will ensure that our APIs share a common interface and behave similarly to best-of-breed APIs outside VA.

Building upon these standards reduces the documentation needed to get started and lets developers access the more in-depth, industry-standard documentation elsewhere if desired.

In this section:

  • API-first: Creating API contract before beginning development.
  • Documentation: Documenting the API in a format both humans and computers understand.
  • Architecture: REST as the architectural style we prescribe for distributed systems.
  • Data interchange: JSON as the recommended format for passing data between those systems.
  • Performance & Availability: Expectations for APIs in the sandbox and production environments.