Learning API Styles

Chapter 2. Application Design

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This will be the 5th chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you have comments about how we might improve the content and/or examples in this book, or if you notice missing material within this chapter, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

Before implementing various web APIs, we need to create a context in which we can use these APIs. We need an educational application that will encapsulate various APIs into one project. Without such an application, our web APIs would be loosely hanging code snippets that are hard to relate to. Hence, having an application at the core will benefit you because it’s easier to relate to something you can understand, see and touch.

In this chapter, we’ll design an application — the weather forecast service (WFS) — by translating client needs to domain concepts and concepts to the code. Then, in the following chapters, we’ll implement the relevant APIs based on the system design that we create in this chapter.

There are two starting points when approaching a system design: informal and formal, each lying at the opposite end of the spectrum. Leslie Lamport gave an overview of this spectrum in a talk thinking ...