Principles of Web API Design

The Full-Lifecycle Guide to API Design

Principles of Web API Design brings together principles and processes to help you succeed across the entire API design lifecycle. Drawing on extensive in-the-trenches experience, leading consultant James Higginbotham helps you align every stakeholder on specific outcomes, design APIs that deliver value, and scale the design process from small teams to the entire organization.

Higginbotham helps you bring an “outside-in” perspective to API design to reflect the voices of customers and product teams, map requirements to specific and well-organized APIs, and choose the right API style for writing them. He walks through a real-world example from the ground up, offering guidance for anyone designing new APIs or extending existing APIs.

Deliver great APIs by getting your design processes right
Gain agreement on specific outcomes from design teams, customers, and other stakeholders
Craft job stories, conduct EventStorming, and model capabilities
Identify the right APIs, and organize operations into coherent API profiles
Choose the best styles for each project: REST, gRPC, GraphQL, or event-based async APIs
Refine designs based on feedback from documenters, testers, and customers
Decompose APIs into microservices
Mature your API program, implementing design and management processes that scale

This guide is invaluable for anyone involved in planning or building APIs—architects, developers, team leaders, managers in single and multi-team environments, and any technical or business professional delivering “API-as-a-product” offerings.

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Author Biography

James Higginbotham is a software developer and architect with over 25 years of experience in developing and deploying apps and APIs. He guides enterprises through their digital transformation journey, ensuring alignment between business and technology through product-based thinking to deliver a great customer experience. James engages with teams and organizations to help them align their business, product, and technology strategies into a more composable and modular enterprise platform. James also delivers workshops that help cross-functional teams to apply an API design-first approach using his ADDR process. His industry experience includes banking, commercial insurance, hospitality, travel, and the airline industry where he helped to get an airline off the ground—literally. You can learn more about his latest efforts at https://launchany.com and on Twitter @launchany.