This is the first part of a series of stories I’m planning to write on developing APIs. I’m hoping to help share some techniques and my approach to developing APIs along the way.
So, where to start? Documentation of course!
Developing an API should first start with documentation. That documentation should be treated as a first class artifact created by developers.
You might be wondering “um, how about writing some code” and its a fair question. How people use an API is they make a request, and that request conforms to a spec. How does that spec get communicated? Sometimes…
To Project Or Not Project
While writing a ContentProvider for an Android app I wondered, when I call query() on a ContentProvider, should I start specifying a projection? One of the parameters to ContentProvider.query() is an array of Strings, called the projection. Each element in the array should be the name of a column you would like to have returned by the query.
Now most times my own use of a SQLite database in an Android app is pretty basic. I want to persist an object that is more complex than what SharedPreferences would allow, or I need to store multiple objects. I’m really limiting…
