Development Process¶

Guidance

API Teams should determine requirements.
API Teams should develop a design to handle those requirements.
API Teams should practice an iterative development cycle, which often means revisiting requirements and refining design as the development is completed.
API design should be a generic interface, and not specialized to a single consumer.
Development of an API should take place in the development environment.

Requirements¶

API development starts with understanding the requirements to know why this effort is worthwhile:

What functionality does the API provide?
What potential applications might be built with the API?
Who will the expected consumers be?
How will consumers interact with the interface?
Where will the API be hosted?
What is the expected load initially, and growth over time?

Next, the focus turns to the design of the API:

Design¶

Early in the design phase, set up a development environment to handle a simple request to validate the infrastructure functions as expected. The request should traverse all layers of your infrastructure, including:

authentication and authorization layer
cache layer (if any will exist)
endpoint:
- controller
- validation layer
- business layer(s)
- persistent data store(s)
- response layer
  - return a well-formed response
logging integration

Iterative Development¶

Establish automated workflow processes to build, validate and deploy the code base as changes are completed.
Stub out the business behavior layers and any interactions with other services during early development, building the layers iteratively as designs materialize.

Automate validation¶

Validate the expected endpoint behavior and the request and response object structures as development is iterating.
Establish automated testing to validate behavior.