What should a developer know before building an API for a community based website?

Question

What things should a developer designing and implementing an API for a community based website know before starting the heavy coding? There are a bunch of APIs out there like Twitter API, Facebook API, Flickr API, etc which are all good examples. But how would you build your own API?

What technologies would you use? I think it's a good idea to use REST-like interface so that the API is accessible from different platforms/clients/browsers/command line tools (like curl). Am I right? I know that all the principles of web development should be met like caching, availability, scalability, security, protection against potential DOS attacks, validation, etc. And when it comes to APIs some of the most important things are backward compatibility and documentation. Am I missing something?

On the other hand, thinking from user's point of view (I mean the developer who is going to use your API), what would you look for in an API? Good documentation? Lots of code samples?

This question was inspired by Joel Coehoorn's question "What should a developer know before building a public web site?".

This question is a community wiki, so I hope you will help me put in one place all the things that should be addressed when building an API for a community based website.

Answer 1

If you really want to define a REST api, then do the following:

1) forget all technology issues other than HTTP and media types.

2) Identify the major use cases where a client will interact with the API

3) Write client code that perform those "use cases" against a hypothetical HTTP server. The only information that client should start with is the response from a GET request to the root API url. The client should identify the media-type of the response from the HTTP content-type header and it should parse the response. That response should contain links to other resources that allow the client to perform all of the APIs required operations.

When creating a REST api it easier to think of it as "user interface" for a machine rather than exposing an object model or process model. Imagine the machine navigating the api programmatically by retrieving a response, following a link, processing the response and following the next link. The client should never construct an URL based on its knowledge of how the server organizes resources.

4) How those links are formatted and identified is critical. The most important decision you will make in defining a REST API is your choice of media types. You either need to find standard ways of representing that link information (think Atom, microformats, atom link-relations, Html5 link relations) or if you have specialized needs and you don't need really wide reach to many clients, then you could create your own media-types.

5) Document how those media types are structured and what links/link-relations they may contain. Specific information about media types is critical to the client. Having a server return Content-Type:application/xml is useless to a client if it wants to do anything more than parse the response. The client cannot know what is contained in a response of type application/xml. Some people do believe you can use XML schema to define this but there are several disadvantages to this and it violates the REST "self-descriptive message" constraint.

6) Remember that what the URL looks like has absolutely no bearing on how the client should operate. The only exception to this, is that a media type may specify the use of templated URIs and may define parameters of those templates. The structure of the URL will become significant when it comes to choosing a server side framework. The server controls the URL structure, the client should not care. However, do not let the server side framework dictate how the client interacts with the API and be very cautious about choosing a framework that requires you to change your API. HTTP should be the only constraint regarding the client/server interaction.