Talking about API strategy can be confusing. Some people talk about it like it’s the same thing as API design. The truth is, both of these are essential to the success of your API, however, they are completely separate things. And never forget that.
In fact, the strategy is something that needs to be worked out before the design phase even begins. A carefully planned strategy will help you keep the programmers that will use your API completely satisfied and make their application way better.
Design and strategy are two things dependent on each other!
Before you start building your API, you need to think what you want from your API. You need to create a strategy that will cover the complete API lifecycle and every part of it. Both the strategy and the design phases need to be aligned perfectly for the API to be successful.
When it comes to designing of the API, you need to determine the direction of the project before your team starts working on details. It makes perfect sense why strategy is important. The strategy will dictate the direction your team needs to take and design will use all those objectives to help you build your API according to plan.
The design process is there to provide accuracy and flexibility to your API. That translates into easier implementation of your API and easier applying to the architectures other programmers are using. Basically, this will make your API appealing to a huge number of people.
And now, we’ll go over some of the most important API design principles that are essential to the process itself. If you follow those principles it is guaranteed that your API will be successful.
- Functionality: Your API should be available in the right form, when and where is needed.
- Easy-to-use for other users: It also needs to be easy to understand and implement
- Experienced developers: First-time developers usually have problems with the process
You need to know how your API works and what are its goals
When you start working on your strategy, you should keep your business goals in mind and see how you can achieve them with your API. Also, you need to think about how to make an API that will be useful for a good number of years. You should look and start something market lacks.
How to make your API easy-to-use for other users
It is crucial to make your API easy to access and use. That’s because other users want to use your API to make their app design process shorter and easier for their team. If you want to avoid answering countless questions about how your API works, this is the right thing to do.
Usability and Security of your API
Using and control of what your API is doing is important. You should make that easy for future users. Of course, business and operational metrics need to be worked out properly. And while security measures are a must, they shouldn’t be overly complicated.
Your API needs to be adaptable
The API should be adaptable to the demands of the business that’s implementing it in its architecture. But you should make sure that your architecture is in order before the launch. You shouldn`t let your users modify the API’s code, but there is nothing wrong in making it adaptable.
The Bottom Line
And now you know what you need to do in order to create a good strategy and start the design process. If you’re discussing one of these two with your fellow developers, make sure that API strategy isn’t the same thing as API design in order to stay on the same page.
We hope our article will help you design the right strategy and make the design process easier than ever. As always, if you have additional questions – or if you feel like we left something important out – feel free to leave a comment in the comment section below.
