API Strategy & Practice Conference 2017

Google makes and uses a lot of APIs. Every Google service is built with APIs, and Google publishes hundreds of APIs for external developers. Maintaining quality and consistency across the organization requires a strong dedication to governance. We will share our experience with the process of writing, approving and publishing our API Design Guide. We will also talk about the importance of governance, and about the process and tools we use to keep our APIs of consistently high quality.

Description: 
REST APIs tend to be created with single resources, without references to other related resources. The gold standard for REST includes hypermedia for related resources, but how can a server best provide the related resources to clients? This talk explores a few different approaches to handling related data, with thought given to request size, cacheability and scaling. 

Abstract: 
In Richardson’s Maturity Model, the Glory of REST lives in hypermedia. However, many REST APIs don’t incorporate hypermedia, and even when it’s available it tends to result in a very chatty transaction. Various companies have solved this problem with different approaches, and some new technologies have given API providers even more choice in helping their clients provide the best user experience.The richness of our data has made it important to tackle this topic so API clients can provide a rich user experience. 

The approaches I will discuss include: 
* Hypermedia guided calls - Clients choose which additional resources to request based on hypermedia information 
* Hypermedia-driven expansion - Netflix’s original API allowed clients to expand related resources inline to retrieve a richer dataset 
* Specialized query language - LinkedIn’s complex graph was served by a specialized query language 
* GraphQL - Framework for graph queries to shape custom requests 
* Hypermedia-driven H/2 Server Push - Offering related information for clients to process or reject 

Redesigning a public web service API is a major undertaking: 3 years, thousands of hours of work, new clients, new documentation, a series of releases... This is the story of the DNSimple API v2, a project that started with a single, innocuous GitHub pull request with the title "Proposal for versioned API" in December 2013, and which came to a successful general availability launch at the end of 2016. Simone will explain some of the decisions that the team took over the last 3 years that shaped the development of the API as well as challenges the team faced, and provide you with tips and techniques that may help you in your next major API project. Finally, the important question: what’s next?

"Developers have been debating RPC vs. REST for some time, and now we have GraphQL and other options growing in popularity. But what happens to our API design when we add bots, edge devices, and voice into the mix?

This talk examines how our APIs must change in the world of bots, voice, and edge devices. We'll also look at ways that we can future-proof our API design in light of these new ways of interaction. Finally, we'll identify design strategies to support the growing need for edge computing."