Talks
Fast, Testable and SANE APIs
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Fast, Testable and SANE APIs
by Ben LovellIn his talk at the Ancient City Ruby 2014 event, Ben Lovell explores the intricacies of building fast, testable, and sane JSON APIs using Rails. He incorporates humor and anecdotes to engage the audience while discussing several essential components of API design. Lovell begins by highlighting his background in programming and his passion for creating efficient APIs. The main themes and key points of the presentation include:
- API Design Principles: APIs should be fast, standardized, and intuitive, ensuring ease of discovery and usage for developers.
- JSON API Standard: Lovell introduces the JSON API standard, emphasizing its role in simplifying API development by eliminating unnecessary configurations.
- Resource Management: He explains the significance of treating singular resources like collections, applying proper pluralization and nesting.
- Linking Resources: The structure of JSON API allows for linking related resources by utilizing reserved keywords such as 'links' and 'ID'.
- Real-World Anecdote: Lovell shares a humorous story about migrating the royal.gov.uk website and the mishap that occurred, reinforcing the importance of careful deployment practices.
- Side-Loading Resources: He discusses the necessity of including a links section when side-loading documents to maintain clarity in responses.
- Active Model Serializers: Lovell highlights how Active Model Serializers can enhance API response efficiency.
- Testing and Versioning: He stresses the importance of maintaining compatibility and versioning in APIs, advocating for additive changes to preserve backward compatibility without altering the existing API structure.
Throughout the presentation, Lovell's light-hearted approach makes the heavy subject of API design more approachable, and he successfully conveys the essential strategies for building effective APIs. In conclusion, developers are encouraged to focus on speed, user experience, and good practices in API design to create robust industry-standard solutions.
00:00:00.120
Hello, everybody! How are we doing? I'm Ben Lovell.
00:00:11.580
I own a piece of every country in the world except for America.
00:00:17.460
So, yeah! You can tweet me if you like or find me on GitHub.
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You can even Google Plus me if you want.
00:00:30.420
Leon was talking about this whole social networking theme and the dystopia surrounding it.
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What Google has done is make it nearly impossible for people to follow you, so everything you say is effectively to yourself.
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Right, Leon?
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I’m going to get so drunk tonight! But that's not my GitHub timeline.
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So yeah, look at me! Wow! You can see in the middle picture that I actually grew into these teeth and these ears.
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The one on the left, though, hell!
00:01:17.640
Bring it! I have killed and I will kill again!
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I like to tell a few jokes, I like beards, and I like swearing.
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I love my mum. She said something really funny to me the other day.
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She said, "Of all of your siblings, I have five brothers and one sister, so there's a ton of us.
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You're not the smartest one," but you can make people laugh.
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She said I needed to play to my skills.
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So, I'm probably not going to teach you anything today.
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Well, I might teach you one thing: Don't invite me to your conference to speak!
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Some of my interests include race driving; here I am driving my car, which is great fun.
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I'm not as good as DHH. You can see him there crashing his car.
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I was actually at this race, and what you can't hear is that when he crashed, he lifted his visor and exclaimed, "Oh my gosh!".
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I'm quite adept at various programming languages—Visual Basic is amazing.
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You've got the Professional Edition for the professionals and the Enterprise Edition for people who own suitcases and briefcases.
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It's the best. I work for One Minus One.
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You're probably going to ask, "Why don't you call yourself Zero?" Well, I've heard that one a million times!
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I work in Farnham, which is a place that none of you have probably ever heard of.
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You're probably not going to travel there, and I'd advise against it.
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That’s me! I like Star Wars and pair programming—sometimes after taking important business calls.
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But, you know, we deal with it!
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I've been traveling a lot lately and was recently in the Philippines.
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It was really nice and hot, but I kind of miss home.
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While browsing the internet for whimsical things that reminded me of home, I found some interesting news.
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For example, we've got some interesting headlines, like the Supreme resilience of windshields vs. the resilience of ornamental snails.
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Who writes this stuff? We've also got ducks taking refuge from the rain and fury over giant hedges. And there's a headline about seagulls turning off TVs in Exeter.
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It all started with this first student attacked by a seagull, which prompted an angry seagull strike back.
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And that brings us to building awesome JSON APIs!
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I got your segues; I got your segues! I'm going to talk about a bunch of topics, interspersed with the jokes I tell.
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We’ll cover Rails API, which is pretty awesome, and JSON APIs as well.
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You're familiar with bike settings and ActiveModelSerializers because JSON can be a bit tedious.
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We will also touch upon HTTP and REST.
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I'm going to need a rest in a minute!
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Moreover, we have Etsy and some stuff that just cannot be categorized.
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And there are unrelated pictures that will remind me to take a break—how are we doing?
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Great! Have you learned anything about seagulls?
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Yeah, bastards!
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In my limited worldview as a Visual Basic programmer, there are some good components of API design.
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APIs must be fast, standardized, and intuitive, meaning they should be easy to discover and use.
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This brings us to JSON API, an emerging standard.
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Its aim is to cut out the need for bike settings; it's maintained by Haley Dunn.
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This is particularly interesting because you can contribute to it.
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If you've written a JSON API, you might recognize this format.
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The header section with links is similar to hypermedia, which I’ll elaborate on shortly.
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There are some dictates by the JSON API standard that are mostly common sense, aimed at enhancing API usability.
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You should treat singular resources like collections, with proper pluralization and nesting.
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The JSON API reserves only a few keywords, such as 'links' and 'ID'.
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This structure allows you to link related resources by their IDs.
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You can use a URI expansion as per RFC guidelines.
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Let me tell you a quick story about the Queen of England.
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Back when I was a junior VB programmer, I worked on a project to move the royal.gov.uk website from a Unix environment to Windows.
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This was while I worked for a consultancy known for ASP.
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Here’s the fun part: the Royal Family always has their obituaries in draft form.
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After I shipped my feature, I went home for the weekend, only to get paged with a problem.
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Apparently, all draft obituaries were accidentally deployed, and I killed them all!
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But back to JSON API—the format allows you to express compound and side-loaded documents.
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This is useful since the fastest form of HTTP is no HTTP at all, which benefits API consumers.
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The JSON API specification outlines how to include associated documents.
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There are primarily three levels of associations: first-level, association of associations, and unrelated documents.
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The side-loaded documents appear under a named, pluralized section in the JSON response.
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It's essential to include a links section when you're side-loading resources to maintain clarity.
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When you read the JSON API standard, it uses clear RFC language.
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You can substitute words like 'should' and 'must' for more playful alternatives if you wish.
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Apart from JSON API, active model serializers help make API responses more efficient.
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You can use rack-test without bringing in the whole view layer.
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So when testing your APIs, you can verify response codes based on the data and URI.
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It's crucial to maintain compatibility for versioning as well.
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As a piece of advice concerning versioning, once you've built your API, you shouldn't change it.
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If there are necessary changes, make them additive to maintain backwards compatibility.
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Your tests are vital for proving this compatibility.
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That wraps up my brief overview of creating fast, testable, and sane APIs.
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I appreciate you all for being here and hope to chat more during our break.
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Thanks!
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