The Contract
The importance of getting the API correct and the initial design of the API.
💡 I am now writing at andrewhowden.com. Check out this article over there!
The Contract
The fundamental assumption I am making with this application is that it will be consumed over the network. There are two different was we can express the internal state of this application over the network:
- As a rendered user interface to be consumed by a browser
- As an interface through which clients can make specific remote procedure calls (RPCs) and receive structured information but no user interface
Generally speaking I strongly prefer the latter approach.
To render or not to render
In small teams and within a limited use case the first approach in which the user interface (via HTML documented) makes some sense. It is:
- Well supported
- Quickly shippable
- Easy to reason about
However, in my experience it runs into a couple of issues if ether of those assumptions start to fail.
😲 Oh no! The remaining article is gone!
Don’t worry. You can still check it out at andrewhowden.com!
I’m moving most of my content to a personal website, powered by SubStack. This is because I’m writing there in future, and I want to centralize all of this material there rather than have some writing in one place, and some in another. While I appreciate this is annoying, this content will be available there for you going forward, and you’ll even be able to subscribe to some new and (hopefully interesting) work!
Thanks ♥
