API: Be nice to your clients

1. Why?

There are so many things that help us to receive strong compliments from clients. I decided to share with you some of them we took and re-used and refined among three different projects. So, you can apply these things to be nice to your clients ❤️❤️❤️.

2. What?

2.1. Swagger

Provide a nice and up-to-date documentation of your APIs.

2.2. Unit test

There are many benefits of Unit testing:

The process becomes more agile
Improve quality of Code
Find Bugs more easily
Reduce Costs

2.3. Handle exception

Exceptions are essentially abnormal conditions that are caught by the hardware (like dividing by zero) or the operating system (like trying to write to a file on a full disk). The number of combinations of the cases in a large, complex program may be much larger, which may increase the burden on the programmer. Exception handling is an easier way than writing several more lines of code to compensate for each case. It can protect the Application from being stuck or terminated.

2.4. API Versioning

API versioning is the practice of transparently managing changes to your API. So, with API versioning, you can easily manage API changes by:

Continue support for existing properties/endpoints
Add new properties/endpoints rather than changing existing ones
Thoughtfully sunset obsolete properties/endpoints

There are 4 methods to versioning APIs:

Versioning through URI Path (e.g. http://www.example.com/api/1/products)
Versioning through query parameters (e.g. http://www.example.com/api/products?version=1)
Versioning through custom headers
Mix versioning