Build APIs you won't hate : everyone and their dog wants an API, so you should probably learn how to build them

API development is becoming increasingly common for server-side developers thanks to the rise of front-end JavaScript frameworks, iPhone applications, and API-centric architectures. It might seem like grabbing stuff from a data source and shoving it out as JSON would be easy, but surviving changes in business logic, database schema updates, new features, or deprecated endpoints can be a nightmare. After finding many of the existing resources for API development to be lacking, Phil learned a lot of things the hard way through years of trial and error. This book aims to condense that experience, taking examples and explanations further than the trivial apples and pears nonsense tutorials often provide. Phil worked primarily as an API developer for the last three years. One horror was managing an API built in FuelPHP by a freelancer at the million dollar startup he joined. It was utilizing a then deprecated ORM which had been hacked to death by the previous developer, so took the time to delete that mess and build the next version in Laravel, leveraging it's simple routing, database migrations, schema, seeding, etc. When the following major version of the API was built no rewrite was required, and both managed to live side-by-side on the same "API" servers. By passing on some best practices and general good advice you can hit the ground running with API development, combined with some horror stories and how they were overcome/avoided/averted. This book will discuss the theory of designing and building APIs in any language or framework, with this theory applied in PHP-based examples. Some of the more advanced topics covered here are endpoint testing, embedding data objects in a consistent and scalable manner, paginating responses (including embedded objects) and hypermedia "HATEOAS" controls. Introduction Sample Code 1. Useful Database Seeding 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Introduction to Database Seeding 1.3 Building Seeders 1.4 That is about it 1.5 Secondary Data 1.6 When to run this? 2. Planning and Creating Endpoints 2.1 Functional Requirements 2.2 Endpoint Theory 2.3 Planning Endpoints 3. Input and Output Theory 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Requests 3.3 Responses 3.4 Supporting Formats 3.5 Content Structure 4. Status Codes, Errors and Messages 4.1 Introduction 4.2 HTTP Status Codes 4.3 Error Codes and Error Messages 4.4 Error or Errors 4.5 Standards for Error Responses 4.6 Common Pitfalls 5. Endpoint Testing 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Concepts & Tools 5.3 Setup 5.4 Initialise 5.5 Features 5.6 Scenarios 5.7 Prepping Behat 5.8 Running Behat 6. Outputting Data 6.1 Introduction 6.2 The Direct Approach 6.3 Transformations with Fractal 6.4 Hiding Schema Updates 6.5 Outputting Errors 6.6 Testing this Output 6.7 Homework 7. Data Relationships 7.1 Introduction 7.2 Subresources 7.3 Foreign Key Arrays 7.4 Compound Documents (aka Sideloading) 7.5 Embedded Documents (aka Nesting) 7.6 Summary 8. Debugging 8.1 Introduction 8.2 Command-line Debugging 8.3 Browser Debugging 8.4 Network Debugging 9. Authentication 9.1 Introduction 9.2 When is Authentication Useful? 9.3 Different Approaches to Authentication 9.4 Implementing an OAuth 2.0 Server 9.5 Where the OAuth 2.0 Server Lives 9.6 Understanding OAuth 2.0 Grant Types 10. Pagination 10.1 Introduction 10.2 Paginators 10.3 Offsets and Cursors 11. Documentation 11.1 Introduction 11.2 Types of Documentation 11.3 Picking a Tool 11.4 Setting up API Blueprint and Aglio 11.5 Learning API Blueprint Syntax 11.6 Further Reading 12. HATEOAS 12.1 Introduction 12.2 Content Negotiation 12.3 Hypermedia Controls 13. API Versioning 13.1 Introduction 13.2 Different Approaches to API Versioning 13.3 Ask Your Users Conclusion Further Reading API Web Resources Non-API Books