We've teamed up with James Higginbotham of LaunchAny and Keith Casey of Casey Software to bring you their hand-curated weekly newsletter for API developers. You can subscribe to the API Developer Weekly email newsletter here.
Also, be sure to check out James's and Keith's new book A Practical Approach to API Design on Leanpub. On to the links!
Hot Topics
GlueCon 2014 Takeaways, Notes and Slides
Another year, another great GlueCon in Broomfield, Colorado. View our set of notes from as many sessions as we could attend, as well as links to slides and other articles.
How to secure your REST API the right way
A detailed summary of the GlueCon presentation by Les Hazelwood, CTO at Stormpath, on what to do (and not do) to secure your API.
API Usability and Developer Experience Resources
Some links to a variety of resources for further research into building APIs with a focus on the developer experience.
LinkedIn Announces Open Source Rest.li API Hub
"The LinkedIn engineering team will announce the open source release of its Rest.li API Hub. LinkedIn released Rest.li as open source just over a year ago. In that time, adoption has been swift and now over half of remote calls use Rest.li. In a nutshell, Rest.li constitutes a REST framework for building scalable RESTful architectures"
The Business of APIs
Treating your API like a product
A great Slideshare that encourages product companies to look at their APIs as a product, not as an add-on solution.
How to choose the right methodologies for your (Mobile) API
Building a business around your API requires that you choose the right methodologies across three key concerns: building the business, customer development, and product development. Focused on mobile devices, but many of the concepts translate to other types of API development as well.
Gathering My Thoughts With APIs In Higher Education
Kin Lane reports on some recent insights and opportunities with APIs in higher education and how it might help shape the next generation of APi developers.
API First isn't just for startups anymore
A review of Kirsten Hunter's presentation at GlueCon on how established product companies are moving to an API First approach to product development.
API Development
TDD your API
A look at how to approach test-driven development for your API, including a look at how it differs from the traditional TDD approach for your code.
MuleSoft releases the first NodeJS RAML implementation
"Osprey is a NodeJS-based framework conceived with the mission of developing RESTful APIs in a really easy (and IMHO happy) way. Since it’s based on the RAML standard, it responds to a conventional way of defining, creating and documenting RESTful APIs"
NARWHL: A Practical API Design Framework
Confused about how to design your API? Skip all the debates and check out this framework that helps steer you through the most important steps to build a great API. Comments are being solicited by the creator, Rob Zazueta, to continue to improve the site.
Facebook: MVC Does Not Scale, Use Flux Instead
A look at some findings from Facebook on the use of MVC frameworks vs. other solutions, including an update after a round of comments.
Lessons learnt from designing the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization API
"This essay is an attempt to put down my thoughts on how to design a real-world yet beautiful RESTful API. It draws from the experience I have gained being involved in the design of the RESTful API for Red Hat’s Enterprise Virtualization product, twice."
Cloud Watch (from Cloud Developer Weekly Newsletter)
Playing with Docker and a private repository
A tutorial demonstrating how to setup a private Docker repository for storing and retrieving your container images for security or reduced impact due to external repository downtime.
Docker Service Discovery
"It is pretty common to have multiple applications communicate with each other over a network.In this tutorial we will demonstrate how to setup Docker containers so they can communicate with each other transparently via Links.
On the Importance of Logs
Guidance from an AWS Solutions Architect on why logs are important, the types of logs your application products, and a view of the log analysis landscape.
Continuous Integration for Service-oriented Architectures
A look at Artsy, which started as a monolithic application and moved to a service-oriented architecture, and how that move changed the way they do continuous integration.
An Introduction to AWS OpsWorks With Tips And Tricks
"With OpsWorks, AWS enables us to deploy full application stacks in the Cloud while retaining control over the details of the deployment. There are no constraints on what we can tell our EC2 instances to do, provided that we can either reuse, extend or replace AWS’s cookbooks."
Want to share something?
As always, if you want to chat, share a link, or make a suggestion, feel free to drop James or Keith a quick note using Twitter (@launchany and @caseysoftware) or by emailing james@launchany.com.