Matthias Biehl

Looking for the big picture of building APIs? This book is for you! Building APIs that consumers love should certainly be the goal of any API initiative. However, it is easier said than done. It requires getting the architecture for your APIs right. This book equips you with both foundations and best practices for API architecture. This book is for you if you want to understand the big picture of API design and development, you want to define an API architecture, establish a platform for APIs or simply want to build APIs your consumers love. This book is NOT for you, if you are looking for a step-by step guide for building APIs, focusing on every detail of the correct application of REST principles. In this case I recommend the book "API Design" of the API-University Series. What is API architecture? Architecture spans the bigger picture of APIs and can be seen from several perspectives: API architecture may refer to the architecture of the complete solution consisting not only of the API itself, but also of an API client such as a mobile app and several other components. API solution architecture explains the components and their relations within the software solution. API architecture may refer to the technical architecture of the API platform. When building, running and exposing not only one, but several APIs, it becomes clear that certain building blocks of the API, runtime functionality and management functionality for the API need to be used over and over again. An API platform provides an infrastructure for developing, running and managing APIs. API architecture may refer to the architecture of the API portfolio. The API portfolio contains all APIs of the enterprise and needs to be managed like a product. API portfolio architecture analyzes the functionality of the API and organizes, manages and reuses the APIs. API architecture may refer to the design decisions for a particular API proxy. To document the design decisions, API description languages are used. We explain the use of API description languages (RAML and Swagger) on many examples. This book covers all of the above perspectives on API architecture. However, to become useful, the architecture needs to be put into practice. This is why this book covers an API methodology for design and development. An API methodology provides practical guidelines for putting API architecture into practice. It explains how to develop an API architecture into an API that consumers love. A lot of the information on APIs is available on the web. Most of it is published by vendors of API products. I am always a bit suspicious of technical information pushed by product vendors. This book is different. In this book, a product-independent view on API architecture is presented. The API-University Series is a modular series of books on API-related topics. Each book focuses on a particular API topic, so you can select the topics within APIs, which are relevant for you.

API Architecture

Do you want to know how OpenID Connect works? This book is for you! Exploring how OpenID Connect works in detail is the subject of this book. We take a bottom-up approach and first study all the elements (actors, endpoints, and tokens) of OpenID Connect. This puts us in an excellent position for the second step: to understand the various OpenID Connect Flows - how the actors, endpoints, and tokens are put together to transmit identity claims securely. Do you wonder why there are several OpenID Connect Flows? Whether we use OpenID Connect from a mobile app, a script in a browser or from a secure backend server, there is an appropriate OpenID Connect Flow with the right tradeoffs in security, functionality, and convenience for each of these scenarios. This book helps you to choose the right one. Do you think that these OpenID Connect Flows are confusing? You are not alone; the OpenID Connect Flows tend to get confusing. However, with this book, we make it clear and easy to understand: We visualize these flows and show how to choose the flow that is appropriate for a given scenario. A picture says more than a 1000 words - that is why we explain the OpenID Connect Flows using easy to understand sequence diagrams. Do you want to understand how JWT works? This book explains what a JSON Web Token (JWT) is, how it is used in OpenID Connect, how it is constructed, what data it contains, how to read it, and how to protect its contents. Do you wonder why there are so many tokens in OpenID Connect and how to use them? There are JWT, JWS, JWE, access tokens, refresh tokens, identity tokens, and authorization codes. This book helps you to make sense of them all. Using examples, we explore how the tokens are used, constructed, signed, and encrypted. Why is OpenID Connect so popular? If used in the right way, OpenID Connect is powerful, and everyone loves it: End-users don't need to signup and remember a new password Business owners enjoy high conversion rates Developers don't get any grey hair over securely storing credentials Do you want to increase the conversion rate of your app? Signup and login to a new app become so smooth and convenient that end-users are much more likely to try a new app. It is supported, e.g. by Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft. Would you like to manage no credentials but still have authenticated users? For us developers of web and mobile apps, these signup and login features are attractive, too: we do not need to manage user credentials, and we get a higher conversion rate resulting in more new customers. In effect, this means cutting costs and increasing the number of new customers for our apps. Which programming language do you use in the book? This is not a programming book, don't expect implementations with a specific programming language or library. Instead, we focus on understanding OpenID Connect on a conceptual level, so we can design and architect apps that work with OpenID Connect. And OpenID Connect is the standard behind creating smooth login and signup experiences, increasing the customer signup rate, and creating highly converting apps.

OpenID Connect & JWT

This is a book for developers, who not only want to learn how to develop software for Alexa but also want to make money with Alexa. Want to start a side business or a SaaS startup? Just as in the early days of mobile, when fortunes were made with mobile apps on the app store, it is now the perfect time to catch the opportunities offered by voice apps. Amazon Alexa, the voice platform with the broadest adoption, helps developers like you and me, to develop, distribute, market and monetize their Alexa Skills on the Amazon Alexa Store. Want to develop and program Alexa Skills? In this book, you learn step-by-step how to create your first Alexa Skill with the Alexa Developer Console, AWS Lambda, the Alexa CLI, and node.js with the Alexa SDK. Want to scale and grow your Alexa Software Startup? You get a deep-dive into the various ways of making money with Alexa. You learn about the business models for Alexa Skills, marketing and monetizing your Alexa Skill on and off the Alexa Store, opportunities for offering in-skill purchases, and about programming the various purchase and payment flows. Want to build advanced Alexa Skills that users love? The book covers many advanced features of Alexa in plain English, such as account linking, audio streaming, session management and much more. You learn how to personalize your Skill with the user's data and linking the Skill to popular cloud apps, such as Spotify, Google and many more. This will help you create unique apps that stand out on the market and improve the lives of many Alexa users.

Making Money with Alexa Skills – A Developer’s Guide

Got RESTful APIs? Great. API consumers love them. But today, such RESTful APIs are not enough for the evolving expectations of API consumers. Their apps need to be responsive, event-based and react to changes in near real-time. This results in a new set of requirements for the APIs, which power the apps. APIs now need to provide concepts such as events, notifications, triggers, and subscriptions. These concepts are not natively supported by the REST architectural style. In thios book we show how to engineer RESTful APIs that support events with a webhook infrastructure. What are the alternatives to webhooks? We study several approaches for realizing events, such as Polling, Long Polling, Webhooks, HTTP Streaming, Server-Sent Events, WebSockets, WebSub and GraphQL Subscriptions. All of these approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. Can webhooks communicate in real-time? We study the non-functional requirements of a webhooks infrastructure, in areas such as security, reliability and developer experience. How do well-known API providers design webhooks? We examine the webhook infrastructure provided by GitHub, BitBucket, Stripe, Slack, and Intercom. With the best practices, case studies, and design templates provided in this book, we want to help you extend your API portfolio with a modern webhook infrastructure. So you can offer both APIs and events that developers love to use.

Webhooks – Events for RESTful APIs

Building RESTful APIs? Great - API consumers love them if the right design decisions were made. And we need to make a lot of design decisions when building a new API. How do we capture these decisions, gain an overview, communicate the decisions and iterate on the design? To describe APIs in a precise manner, API designers typically use API description languages. They offer specialized language concepts to capture design decisions. Thus, API description languages can be called the power tools of the API designer. One of the most popular API description languages is Swagger and OpenAPI. In this quick guide, we will learn how Swagger/OpenAPI can be used to capture your RESTful API design decisions.

Powertools for RESTful API Design

Swagger and OpenAPI 2. 0

Want to build APIs like Facebook? Since Facebook's framework for building APIs, GraphQL, has become publicly available, this ambition seems to be within reach for many companies. And that is great. But first, let's learn what GraphQL really is and - maybe even more importantly - let's figure out how to apply GraphQL to build APIs that consumers love. Do you like to learn hands-on? In this book, we take a hands-on approach to learning GraphQL. We first explore the concepts of the two GraphQL languages using examples. Then we start writing some code for our first GraphQL API. We develop this API step by step, from creating a schema and resolving queries, over mocking data and connecting data sources all the way to developing mutations and setting up event subscriptions. Are your API consumers important to you? This book shows you how to apply a consumer-oriented design process for GraphQL APIs, so you can deliver what your consumers really want: an API that solves their problems and offers a great developer experience. Do you want to enable the API consumers so they can build great apps? This book explains the GraphQL query language, which allows the API consumers to retrieve data, write data and get notified when data changes. More importantly, you let them decide, which data they really need from the API. Do you want to make your API easy and intuitive to use? This book shows you how to use the GraphQL schema language to define a type system for your API, which serves as a reference documentation and helps your API consumers write queries that are syntactically correct. Do you want to profit from what has worked for others? This book provides a collection of best practices for GraphQL that have worked for other companies, e.g. regarding pagination, authentication and caching. REST vs. GraphQL: Which one is better? GraphQL and REST are competing philosophies for building APIs. It is not in the scope of this book to compare or discuss the two approaches. The focus of this book is on a hands-on approach for learning GraphQL.

GraphQL API Design

Looking for Best Practices for RESTful APIs? This book is for you! Why? Because this book is packed with practical experience on what works best for RESTful API Design. You want to design APIs like a Pro? Use API description languages to both design APIs and develop APIs efficiently. The book introduces the two most common API description languages RAML, OpenAPI, and Swagger. Your company cares about its customers? Learn API product management with a customer-centric design and development approach for APIs. Learn how to manage APIs as a product and how to follow an API-first approach. Build APIs your customers love! You want to manage the complete API lifecycle? An API development methodology is proposed to guide you through the lifecycle: API inception, API design, API development, API publication, API evolution, and maintenance. You want to build APIs right? This book shows best practices for REST design, such as the correct use of resources, URIs, representations, content types, data formats, parameters, HTTP status codes, and HTTP methods. Your APIs connect to legacy systems? The book shows best practices for connecting APIs to existing backend systems. Your APIs connect to a mesh of microservices? The book shows the principles for designing APIs for scalable, autonomous microservices. You expect lots of traffic on your API? The book shows you how to achieve high performance, availability and maintainability. You want to build APIs that last for decades? We study API versioning, API evolution, backward- and forward-compatibility and show API design patterns for versioning. The API-University Series is a modular series of books on API-related topics. Each book focuses on a particular API topic, so you can select the topics within APIs, which are relevant for you.

Matthias Biehl

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