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A 3-Step Process to building **better** (Consumable, Performant, and Resilient)APIs.
Achieving Level-2 Richardson Maturity Model & then some.
How to practically build APIs has been incorporated into a lot of frameworks (such as Tomcat+Spring, express+Inversify).
How to build APIs that are easily consumable, performant, and resilient requires the art of managing scope and budget for sure, and following best practices, along with what worked for others is key.
Famous Richardson Maturity Model for building REST APIs has been around since 2008. It was then promoted by Martin Fowler in his “glory of REST” article in 2010 and put into practice by several engineers, coincidentally, the same year HTTP PATCH specification was introduced.
I am going to focus on Level-2 maturity as described by RMM— I believe that suffices for the majority of large enterprise clients.
Why are we talking about this now, you might ask? A few reasons:
- Large enterprises are widely deploying APIs as part of the modernization cycle more recently
- APIs are being deployed in complex environments (cloud, containers, etc.,) and these environments could benefit from providing advanced REST features not only for functionality but for resiliency purposes
- Databases have evolved to natively support advanced API verbs (e.g., MongoDB and DynamoDB PATCH API endpoints)
