Stop worrying about missing API sunsets — start to use an API for this now — Part I
If you’re interested in an automated solution — please read part II.
Don’t be sad. Tackle the problem now.
The following text will be straight to the point without much lyrical decoration.
Problem
As a [insert your position here], you probably consumed an web api before. Either from a major vendor like facebook and their graph api or from a smaller player.
These apis usually are versioned. Like the current version of the facebook graph api is v2.12. The previous version is v2.11 and it will be available until 2020–01–30.
If you use v2.11 and don’t track the sunset (end of life) date, you will probably wonder in two years what’s going on:
- You missed the deprecation date, again.
- Your implementation refuses to work.
- Your app reputation drops, you and your customers are unhappy.
- You update in panic mode and hope that I will work out.
- And you promise to yourself that it will never happen again.
But tracking these dates manually for all of your apis can be time consuming and is a unnecessary task to do.
Solution
It’s simple: Use a central API that provides all the sunset dates of the other APIs!
This way you can keep track of all the dates in an automated way and get notified like one, three or six months before the apis’ lifetime ends.
And you can properly plan for it, schedule it in a sprint for development and exhaustive testing.
There’s a free API for this: https://inger.io (even on twitter)
How does it look in practise?
So for example for the facebook graph api version v2.11 it would be:
https://inger.io/v1/facebook/graph/v2.11/deprecated
How does the pattern look like?
https://inger.io/v1/{vendor}/{service}/{version}/{deprecated|published}
Placeholders:
{inger_version} Inger.io API Version. v1 is the current one
{vendor} Vendorname like facebook, google, microsoft
{api} Apiname like graph, for the facebook graph api
{version} Apiversion like v2.5, for the graph api of facebook
{method} Either “deprecated” or “published”, to get the deprecation date or published date
Implementation examples to query the deprecation dates for multiple apis at the same time can be found on github (where the PHP example is the most advanced one).
But I just want to get notified without having to implement a consumer for the API by myself!?
That’s reasonable. An additional service subscribing by email, choosing apis and when to get notified, is in the making.
Acknowledgement
There’s a high chance that you’re looking for a vendor who’s not in the list, yet. In this case please simply send an email to hello@inger.io and if possible, add a link to the page or a contact where the sunset dates can be retrieved.
Feedback
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