Joint conferences API Days and API Strategy & Practice took place during the last weekend in Berlin. We’ve had the pleasure of spending great time with the people at the epicenter of the exploding API ecosystem. Read to learn what are the hot topics and possible implications for your apps.
API explosion
With the continued march of mobile platforms, accelerated by the rise of Internet-of-Things, with wide adoption of cloud services the topic of API creation becomes a concern of majority of developers. Regardless of whether you build private or public APIs.
This post adds to the quick notes from the previous post.
Hypermedia
In simple words hypermedia is a way for RESTful API to tell the user (or client system) how to use it. It provides contextual hints and hyperlinks to "things you can do with it". There’s definitely a hype for this, to the point where some say you can't be fully RESTful without using hypermedia.
No one at Evojam is currently convinced it makes sense. Perhaps it will be useful for API visualization or entity versioning. We'll keep an eye on this.
Swagger
Swagger is the tool used by the majority of API tools these days. Even though some of the tool authors quietly admit they’d prefer to use RAML, Swagger has grown so popular it cannot be ignored. If you're building tools for API you cannot ignore it. If you utilize external API tools then your life will be much easier if your API is described in Swagger.