Being a huge fan of the work of Professor Dr. Olaf Zimmermann, I immediately bought “Patterns for API Design: Simplifying Integration with Loosely Coupled Message Exchanges” once it was available in November 2022. Co-authors are: Mirko Stocker, Daniel Luebke, Uwe Zdun and Cesare Pautasso. It’s published in the signature series of Vaughn Vernon.
Excellent book!
And what an excellent book it is! It’s both a catalog of design patterns (44 in total) and it presents a pattern language aiming at a ubiquitous language for establishing an API design vocabulary. API designers, Web developers and integration architects will greatly benefit from reading everything about the Pagination Pattern, Error Report Pattern, Wish List (response shaping), API key, Versioning Strategies and many others. Each pattern corresponds nicely to a phase in the #ADDR process.
Dutch Energy Market
API design is a very important topic and very often underestimated. The API design guidelines in the Dutch Energy market (which is my field of work) are closely related to the API design principles and recommendations of the Dutch Government. Challenge is of course how to apply the patterns of the book in our industry in order to design reliable, well-performing, and secure APIs and how to make design decisions and identify trade-offs.
Patterns that need our closer attention are: Request Bundle, Context Representation and the Wish List Template, to start with. Takeaway is definitely the pattern language. We like to adopt the Operation Responsibilities and Information Holder Types patterns to name a few. A standardized vocabulary certainly adds value to the pattern community. We are inspired and convinced that we can benefit from the architectural knowledge captured in the book and its patterns.
Weekly design pattern mini-series
A great book with lots of information – but hey – where do you start? Pattern 1 at page 1? Even for this question there is a pattern solution: the weekly design pattern series on LinkedIn, started by Olaf in February 2023 featuring the Wish List pattern. It’s sometimes a surprise which pattern will be next (which makes it a nice thing to bet on 😊) so that’s a good reason to stay tuned! This weekly pattern series keeps us in rhythm and in shape while following the slogan:
A pattern a week keeps away design smells and critique!
Adoption story
I hope this post will encourage other API designers and developers to start reading Patterns for API Design and to follow the API design pattern weekly miniseries on LinkedIn. The book is IMHO a must-read for anyone involved in modern system design.
So dear API designer, architect and software engineer – this is the design patterns book you should read!
Furthermore, the authors are very happy to welcome your comments and input. As an enthusiastic reader of the book I have sent my weekly input to Olaf and Mirko. They have published my weekly feedback as an adoption story on the api-patterns.org website (Vielen Dank Zio und Misto 😊!):
https://api-patterns.org/2023/03/15/pattern-adoption-story-1.html
Originally published on:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/patterns-api-design-adoption-story-ton-donker/