Last week took place APIdays Paris 2015, and the API community has been abuzz about the great content, discussions, ideas, and topics covered. Restlet was present with a booth, as well as part of the show, with Jérôme Louvel speaking about the state of Web API languages, Jonathan Michaud on the differences & challenges of public & private APIs. On my side, I participated in a panel discussion with Arnaud Lauret on API documentation, and in a workshop with Allan Denis of transforming a voting API into a nice realtime visualization with APISpark and Streamdata.IO.
Arnaud Lauret provided an awesome detailed report on the conference. And listed some of the slide decks from the speakers (I’ve added a few missing ones I’ve spotted in the wild):
- State of Web API Languages (Jérôme Louvel)
- Public and private APIs: differences and challenges (Jonathan Michaux)
- Automating developer adoption (Nicolas Garnier)
- Hypermedia and Civi Hacking (Shelby Switzer)
- More power to API clients (Yann Simon)
- Simple Servers Clever Clients (Ruben Verborgh)
- APIs and the creation of wealth in the digital economy (Steven Willmott)
- Bold Predictions for the 2016 API economy (Neha Sampat)
- Automating business process with APIs (Saul Caganoff)
- Document-API-topia (Arnaud Lauret)
- Build a successful API Overnight : Kill the Unicorn ! (Olivier Etienne)
- Future of AI-powered automation in business (Louis Dorard)
- When RESTful may be considered harmful (Ross Garrett)
- Realtime API consumption (Eric Horesnyi)
- Building successful APIs overnight (Nik Wakelin)
Martin Danielsson also provided an interesting post on APIdays, highlighting the focus on philosophy and technology.
For APIdays, CommitStrip created a set of special strips, including the APInception.
Thierry Templier writes about understanding HTTP content negotiation.
Kin Lane noticed our fun HTTP status code subway map, echoing Kin’s recent thoughts on mapping the complex API world with the help of a similar subway map approach.
Michael Kropat also speaks about choosing HTTP status codes, with some handy diagrams to help you make that choice.
Another one from our favorite API evangelist, about a process to aggregate RSS feeds as APIs for non-developers, using Zapier, Google Sheets and Restlet’s APISpark.
Yves de Montcheuil summarized some interesting tweets he made during Gartner’s AADI event, and Yves expanded on one of his recent 2016 API predictions saying APIs will march toward ubiquity on InfoWorld.
A very thoughtful post from James Higginbotham on moving beyond API reference documentation, detailing why you’re not done when you’ve generated your API reference documentation, as there’s more to it, like guides, troubleshooting tips, case studies, internal design documentation and more.
Brad Fults details the best API documentation, differentiating the audience, listing desired features, making it easy to read, providing tutorials, detailing responses, providing examples & client libraries in multiple technologies, integrating with support, featuring a status page, and more.
One more on API documentation on the Smartbear blog, with Jennifer Riggins interviewing Arnaud Lauret, the API handyman, on the utopia of API documentation, detailing all the desired characteristics of good API documentation, on the need of automation for continuous documentation delivery, or on who’s responsible for authoring the API documentation.
On Nordic APIs blog, Art Anthony shares 8 keys to creating a truly usable API.
Chris Wood does description-agnostic API development with API transformer.
Pedro Felix released part 3 of his series on building evolvable APIs for the web, with a focus on formats (you can still check part 1 on identification and part 2 on interaction), talking about format flexibility, hypermedia & links, and hypermedia types.
GraphQL was covered at APIdays, and this article talks about GraphQL in the age of REST APIs.
Daniel Stenberg of cURL fame is writing a free book titled Everything cURL, where you’ll learn everything about the venerable cURL tool. The book sources are on Github, and Daniel welcomes any contribution.
The SwaggyDoc plugin for the Grails framework by Rahul Sumasunderam adds Swagger support to Grails REST APIs.
A quick focus on the Go language and REST APIs:
- the Go-Swagger toolkit offers various capabilities, like generating a Docker-based Go app implementing a Swagger API definition, a command-line tool to validate Swagger specifications, or generating the specification from your code
- the Goa microservices toolkit, developed at RightScale, takes a different approach, with a special DSL used by code generation to create a Swagger API definition, as well as the client code and server skeleton
- and the test2doc project on Github, allows you to generate API Blueprint documentation from your tests, by extending Go’s built-in testing support
Postman introduces Postman Cloud.
JAWS, the Javascript Amazon Web Services framework, built upon Amazon API Gateway and Amazon lambda, changes name and is now called Serverless.
A video of Benjamin Greenberg of Comcast on using hypermedia APIs to drive interactive mobile applications.
A slide deck from Paulo Gandra de Sousa on the benefits of hypermedia APIs.
On InfoQ, Adam DuVander shares 4 API lessons: outsourcing development, possible regrets on making an API public, not all need your API, and an API can provide more opportunities that one can build.
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