An 8-step guide to tailoring resource API design standards to your organizational context — The Role of API Standards API Development Standards are a focused collection of imperatives, conventions and guidance, and are intended to improve the consistency, stability, generality and usability of business resource APIs. They may be self-contained or reference external standards. They may offer best-practice recommendations and provide a basis for quality assessment.

Integrated Security Patterns, Platforms and Tactics Securing APIs is not simply a problem for the developer to solve. Security-focused enterprise guidance and platforms, a commitment to security testing and a process of security by design are crucial to underpinning robust API security. API gateway platforms are a key component of the enterprise security architecture and should…

A High-Level Overview of API Testing Concepts — Intro API Testing is the subset of testing approaches focused on the API contract. In the case of API-first services, functional and regression tests will be conducted primarily via APIs, making robust and well maintained API tests a critical enabler of agile development and continuous delivery. API testing is described in…

Enhance API composability and control over-fetching with sub-resources, filtering and field selection — The setup and context of the following design patterns are described in this article: API Design Practice A practical guide to API QA and the design of stable, coherent and composable business resource APIsmedium.com The Business Resource Business resources represent the nouns of a system, such as ‘applications’ and ‘applicants’, and provide a context for interaction with a business capability and the business facts about a business domain. …

Improving the Quality and Consistency of APIs with OpenAPI Documentation and Linting Rules — The OpenAPI Specification (OAS) The OpenAPI Specification (OAS) defines a standard, programming language agnostic interface description for REST APIs. Importantly, the specification is widely supported by API Management platforms, development frameworks, testing platforms, code generation tools, and by a number of modelling platforms.

Shaping an API Lifecycle Model for Your Organizational Context — A shared API lifecycle model and vocabulary will simplify governance, enhance productivity and underpin practical guidance for developers from design through to release. The API Lifecycle model presented in this article is not intended to be prescriptive, rather it is meant to spark consideration, discussion and agreement on a tailored…

Methods, Headers, Status Codes and Response Caching — API Development Standards are a focused collection of imperatives, conventions and guidance, and are intended to improve the consistency, stability, generality, predictability and usability of business resource APIs. The following ‘sample’ guidance is focused on request and response protocols, and is an excursion from the parent article, Writing API Development…

Encoding, Data Formats and Document Structure — API Development Standards are a focused collection of imperatives, conventions and guidance, and are intended to improve the consistency, stability, generality, predictability and usability of business resource APIs. The following ‘sample’ set of standards is focused purely on payload conventions and is an excursion from the parent article, Writing API…

Enabling Zero-Trust, Fit-For-Purpose Scope-Based API Authorization — This discussion is an excursion from the parent article Securing APIs with an Integrated Security Framework API Scopes API scopes extend/overload the OAuth scope mechanism and are utilized by OAS 3 and many API management platforms to control access to API operations. API scopes represent an authorization from the owner of a…