Developer Relations and your Company’s APIs – webinar info and links

This week, I am presenting a DevRelate webinar, “Developer Relations and your Company’s APIs” on Wednesday (May 31) and Thursday (June 1). This blog post contains additional information and links covered in the webinar.

APIs and Your Company

 

Developer Relations and APIs

 

API Documentation Examples

 

API Versioning – Overview

 

REST

  • URI
  • Request parameter
  • Media type (aka content negotiation & accept header)
  • Date
  • Custom request header
  • Domain name

 

SOAP

  • XML namespaces and XML comments
  • UDDI version aware service registry

 

Shared Code Files

  • Filename
  • Version resource

 

API Resource Links

 

API Documentation Generation Tools

 

Additional Swagger Resources

The following Swagger related links were provided by SmartBear Software (thank you Keshav and Tracy)

  1. [Blog] API Design Best Practices – https://swaggerhub.com/blog/api-design/api-design-best-practices/
  2. [Blog] What is API Design, and Why it Matters – https://swaggerhub.com/blog/api-design/what-is-api-design/
  3. [Webinar] Scaling your API Design Process – https://swaggerhub.com/blog/api-design/scaling-your-api-design/
  4. [eBook] Optimizing the Swagger collaborative workflow using SwaggerHub – https://swaggerhub.com/blog/api-resources/optimize-your-swagger-api-workflow/
  5. [Blog] Design first or Code first approach to APIs – https://swaggerhub.com/blog/api-design/design-first-or-code-first-api-development/
  6. [Webinar] API Developer Experience (DX), and good documentation practices for good DX – https://swaggerhub.com/blog/api-documentation/api-documentation-and-developer-experience/

 

API Versioning – Examples

 

Facebook / Parse (BaaS) API Shutdown Example

 

Evans Data Developer Program Workshops and Assessments

 

If you have additional API links, best practices, tools, tips, tricks, thoughts and questions, send me an email.

 

David I - Developer Relations Conference

David Intersimone “David I”
Vice President of Developer Communities
Evans Data Corporation
davidi@evansdata.com
Blog: https://www.devrelate.com/blog/
Skype: davidi99
Twitter: @davidi99
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidi99/

Do you provide Swagger YAML and JSON files with your APIs?

Every developer has their own swagger based on their background, education, coding style, programming language used, etc. In this blog post I am talking about a different kind/type of Swagger.

When developers are interested in using an API provided by a operating system, platform, service, cloud, or device vendor, I’ll bet that one of the first things they will search for is to see if there is an API binding for their favorite programming language. Or, maybe your developer program members are the type of developers who just need the REST/JSON calling information? Where possible, I like to use client and server language bindings, components or frameworks for my development projects. Wouldn’t it be great if all APIs included great documentation and also YAML and/or JSON files for the APIs?

Swagger to the Rescue

With the Swagger YAML and/or JSON files I could use Swagger’s CodeGen tool to create bindings for more than 20 server side languages and more than 40 client side languages. That would be awesome. With Swagger supporting a range of tools, both the API developer creator can build their APIs using their programming language of choice and the API developer consumer can use their favorite programming language.

My one simple statement is “If your API supports REST and JSON then you can Reach out to Every Developer“. The text statement on the Swagger site say it succinctly – “Swagger is the world’s largest framework of API developer tools for the OpenAPI Specification(OAS), enabling development across the entire API lifecycle, from design and documentation, to test and deployment.” While most developer program APIs support some common languages including Java, C++, C, C#, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby and Python, there are many other programming languages that also support REST and JSON web services. Why would you intentionally make it harder for developers that use other programming languages?

REST/JSON based APIs work with just about every programming language

My REST/JSON and APIs blog post on the Evans Data DevRelate community site includes links to REST/JSON supporting information for additional programming languages. It’s time for more developer program APIs to make it easier for developers,  using all programming languages, to build applications.

The statement on the Swagger CodeGen tool site says it so well – “Build APIs quicker and improve consumption of your Swagger-defined APIs in every popular language with Swagger Codegen. Swagger Codegen can simplify your build process by generating server stubs and client SDKs from your Swagger specification, so your team can focus on your API’s implementation and adoption.”

Do your Developer Program APIs include Swagger support?

Do you provide you developer program APIs with Swagger YAML and/or JSON files? Send me an email if you do and I’ll be very happy to pass along the word to developers.

 

David I

David Intersimone “David I”
Vice President of Developer Communities
Evans Data Corporation
davidi@evansdata.com
Blog: https://devnet.evansdata.org/
Skype: davidi99
Twitter: @davidi99