Tag Archives: api

API Tips – How to Write API Documentation

This article represents tips on how to write documentation for APIs which are going to be published to developers, both internal and external. It touches upon some of the important areas/points that needed to be included in API documentation such that developers find it easy enough to work with APIs. Please feel free to comment/suggest if I missed to mention one or more important points. Also, sorry for the typos. 3 Areas to Cover while doing API Documentation Landing page which provides details such as high level information of APIs, links to APIs pages, release information, changelog details A summary page providing an overview on APIs in general, list of API …

Continue reading

Posted in API Development, Enterprise Architecture. Tagged with .

Java – How to Get Started with Twitter HBC Streaming API

This article represents instructions on how to get started with HBC, A Java HTTP client, for consuming Twitter’s Streaming API. Please feel free to comment/suggest if I missed to mention one or more important points. Also, sorry for the typos. Following are the key points described later in this article: How to get Twitter Consumer/Access Token Keys Instructions to Get Started with HBC How to get Twitter Consumer/Access Token Keys Before getting started with HBC API for integrating with Twitter API, make sure that you have acquired following four details from Twitter: Consumer Key Consumer Secret Access Token Access Secret Token All of the above keys could be started from …

Continue reading

Posted in Java, Web. Tagged with , .

API – How to Get Started with Facebook API Integration

This article represents steps to get started with Facebook Graph API. In later articles, I shall explain how to integrate using Java and maybe other programming languages. The primary reason I am hooked to Facebook integration these days is my need for getting exploratory data from facebook for data analysis for my Big Data projects. Before getting onto use framework such as RestFB, it is recommended to play with these APIs in the Facebook-provided playground.  I shall be talking in detail about how to get started with RestFB in later articles. Please feel free to comment/suggest if I missed to mention one or more important points. Also, sorry for the …

Continue reading

Posted in Software Quality. Tagged with , , .

Java – How to Get Company Updates using LinkedIn API

This article represents code samples and changes that need to be done in original Linkedin-J framework (open-source) to get company updates of different types such as following: Job Posting Status Updates New Product Please feel free to comment/suggest if I missed to mention one or more important points. Also, sorry for the typos.   Code Samples & Steps to Get Company Updates Following files need to be changed along with mentioned changes: LinkedinApiUrls.properties: Following code needs to be added under APIs mentioned under companies: com.google.code.linkedinapi.client.getCompanyStatusUpdates=http://api.linkedin.com/v1/companies/{id}/updates{queryParameters} LinkedInApiUrls.java: Following code needs to be added: public static final String GET_COMPANY_STATUS_UPDATES = linkedInApiUrls.getProperty(“com.google.code.linkedinapi.client.getCompanyStatusUpdates”); CompaniesApiClient.java: Following APIs need to be added: /** * Gets the …

Continue reading

Posted in Java, Web. Tagged with , .

APIs Performance Testing with Twitter Iago

The article talks about performance testing tool, Iago, which is created at Twitter for testing their core database interfaces, storage sub-systems and domain logic, up to the systems accepting front end web requests. Performance requirement of Twitter platform? Simply speaking, end users expect to read & post tweets with a very fast response time and, Twitter is expected to respond in that manner irrespective of load arriving at it with absolutely no room for any slowness, whatsoever. That is a tough one, isn’t it? This is unlike many enterprise business systems where users can be a little forgiving by waiting for the response to show up. So, they needed to …

Continue reading

Posted in Performance Engineering. Tagged with , .

Google Maps Embed API to Benefit Local Search Engines & Others

The article explores newly launched Google Maps Embed API and talks about the benefit to end users and, some of the business benefits to local search engines. Few days back, Google launched its new Google Maps Embed API using which any business could easily embed google maps in relation with their locations with simple & easy embeddable HTML snippets. Following is how the HTML snippets look like: <iframe width=”600″ height=”450″ frameborder=”0″ style=”border:0″ src=”https://www.google.com/maps/embed/v1/place?key={API_KEY} &q=Space+Needle,Seattle+WA”> </iframe> Lets look at the API parameters (in bold) above: place: Actually, “place” is used for the parameter {mode}. Other values for {mode} could be directions, search, and view. Read for details on different types for mode on …

Continue reading

Posted in News. Tagged with , , , .

New Initiative: API Bar

We would like to introduce our new initiative, namely API Bar, in relation with business APIs that are getting released/published day in day out as part of business strategy by companies of every size (large, medium, small). The reason we have named the initiative as API Bar is that the way APIs (making the business competitive) are coming up every day seems like APIs presented in bottles with different labels  with developers trying to figure out which APIs to use and why? 🙂  As part of this initiative, we shall be doing following activities and publish our findings appropriately from time-to-time: Evaluate the APIs from technical perspective while exploring different …

Continue reading

Posted in API Development, News. Tagged with .

Top 7 Secured Practices for Securing Your Partner APIs

security threat partner API

If you are planning to publish partner APIs for exposing your business services or data to your partners and customers, you may want to consider following top 7 secured best practices to ensure application level security: [adsenseyu2] Access-token based Authentication: Have your partners’ applications authenticate itself (and its users) using access-tokens rather than actual passwords. This is because access-tokens may be easily time-boxed and can be enforced to be renewed at the regular time-intervals. And the theft of access token can not really compromise the actual users’ password with the parent application. In this relation, you may consider using OAuth based authentication technique. In addition to usage of access-token for …

Continue reading

Posted in API Development, Application Security. Tagged with , .

API Economy & Rich Dad, Poor Dad

API Economy Rich Dad Poor Dad

In recent times, as I have been hearing about and, reading a lot on API related articles including topics such as application programming interfaces (APIs) economy, API-First, API-driven development etc, I got extremely fascinated with this API thing. This is where I decided to put my findings around when, why and how to go for API adoption and whether it would be fruitful for business to go for APIs from strategy perspective. Interestingly enough, I found some connection between API thing, and the central theme of the book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. This is where I thought to use key themes from the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad to present …

Continue reading

Posted in API Development. Tagged with .

Tips for Designing Security for Your Public APIs

securing an api

[adsenseyu2] Before we look into tips & techniques to design security for your Public APIs, lets understand what do we mean by Public APIs? Public APIs are APIs that are published to the world including developers, or partners’ developers to create their custom application by making use of APIs. These APIs can be used by another program, mobile apps or web applications (Web UI), desktop client etc. Following are some tips/techniques for designing security for your Public APIs: IP Address Restrictions: To be able to control access to APIs based on IP address from which request arrived, the IP address restrictions policy should be imposed. This is very handy when …

Continue reading

Posted in API Development, Application Security. Tagged with , .

List of Great Videos on API Design & Development

Following are some of the videos I could gather which presents talks on API design & development. How to Design a Good API and Why it Matters?: A great video by Joshua Bloch done some 6 years back.  Great one for those looking to understand what API design & development look like and how to get started? How to Design Good APIs: This video focus on some of the key aspects such as intuitiveness, documentation of API. Life of a Google API Developer: This video presents different aspect of API development.

Posted in API Development. Tagged with .

What makes an API, a great API?

Great API

[adsenseyu2] Before I start on this blog, lets take a look at the quote, “Being complex is easy, being simple is hard”. Do you agree? Well, I have experienced it and agree in totality. This is what it takes in creating a simple-to-understand-and-use API, a complex task. 🙂 Whenever I start writing about API, I do clarify what am I meaning for API? Most of the programmers would think if API is not same as interfaces to the classes that they write. Well, I would say that yes, they are same. However, we usually do not pay attention to write, what is called as “Great API”, as we write the …

Continue reading

Posted in API Development. Tagged with .

A Great API should act as a Building Block!

api

[adsenseyu2] Following are characteristics of a great API: Building Blocks: APIs consisting of one or more methods should act like building blocks that could be assembled in more than one unique ways to create newer applications or apps. This could thus lead to innovation where developers can take up these APIs and create some creative and unique applications serving different functionality and creating substantial value for the end users. For example, look at facebook apps or salesforce apps. Developers worldwide have created several innovative applications by using facebook APIs. Distinct & Stateless: APIs should be distinct in terms of its service offerings and stateless in nature. Thus, invocation of an …

Continue reading

Posted in API Development. Tagged with .

APIs is the Way to Go, You bet!

[adsenseyu2] Not sure if you are aware or not, but the world is waking up to keywords such as API-First, API-Driven Development (ADD) etc. And, this is creating confusion in application developers mind when they hear counter argument against their expression that they have always been doing API driven development where they use to write proper interfaces to their implementations. What is different from then to now? And, what do they need to do differently? But the more important thing to ask is what has led to everyone talking about API driven development? Following are some of the reasons (also, key technology trends of 2014) why APIs has been getting …

Continue reading

Posted in API Development. Tagged with .

Bonita REST API & Application Architecture

Bonita REST API Integration

[adsenseyu2] I have been working on BonitaSoft REST API in order to meet following customers’ requirements: The customer has multiple line of business (LOB) applications. The customer has decided to make a strategic move to offer solutions to their existing and new customers rather than one or more products from their multiple LOBs which can be accessed by a web application dashboard. These solution span across multiple LOB applications and is envisioned to leverage functionality offered by these applications using service API. In this regard, one key fundamental architectural component that got introduced is workflow tool, BonitaSoft. The workflow tool is used to execute one or more workflows which forms …

Continue reading

Posted in API Development, BPM. Tagged with , , .

Are Days Counted for MVC-based Web Applications?

Overkill to maintain two versions for MVC & API

Today, if I am tasked to lay down the architecture for web application, I would no longer be blindly choosing MVC based architecture. Additionally, if this is a migration project from legacy to web application, I would no longer be blindly going for MVC based architecture and choose related MVC frameworks. Not sure if you would agree with me or not. But please read the following and share your thoughts. I would be happy to hear from you. Why am I getting paranoid regarding MVC for web applications? Following are criteria for my considerations for deciding on whether I would select MVC architecture for delivering business functionality on the web: …

Continue reading

Posted in API Development, Web. Tagged with , .