APIs: a Strategy Guide by Jacobson Daniel;Brail Greg;Woods Dan;

Author:Jacobson, Daniel;Brail, Greg;Woods, Dan; [Jacobson, Daniel;Brail, Greg;Woods, Dan;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: COMPUTERS / Internet / General
ISBN: 9781449308926
Publisher: O'Reilly
Published: 2011-12-19T00:00:00+00:00

Read more about REST and JSON

The original REST dissertation can be found at http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm

The JSON specification can be found at http://json.org/

Versioning and API Design

The decision to make an API have a version number, or to be versionless, is an important design consideration because apps that are built atop an API depend on certain functionality working in a particular way. Effectively, an API is the embodiment of a contract between a publisher and a developer. As new API versions are released, that contract should stay intact. This fact needs to be balanced against continuous requests for feature upgrades from users and your internal ability and willingness to support older feature sets in an ongoing basis. Usually, API development teams are small and have a limited capacity for supporting new versions. While developers continually want newer, fancier versions of the API, and end users want to see the apps improve, the reality is that the development team can only support a few versions at a time.

There are many different ways to approach this problem. We’d like to suggest one small, three-step solution:

Somewhere, prominent for each client or for each API call, include version 1. (A common way to do this is to include it in the URI path.)

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