New Book 'Patterns for API Design' Published
(Updated: )Reading time: 2 minutes
Our pattern language for API and service design forms the core of a Signature Series book published by Addison Wesley Professional!
Update (2/2023): Podcast about out book now available! Listen to Daniel Lübke and Vaughn Vernon discussing “Writing Patterns for API Design”.
Update (12/2022): Sample content and supporting website are available now. Read on.
Update (11/2022): Copy editing, typesetting and proofreading have completed. Print books ship from informit.com/api-patterns already; other books stores will follow in the weeks to come. See this discussion on LinkedIn for more pointers.
The Book
The book is called “Patterns for API Design: Simplifying Integration with Loosely Coupled Message Exchanges”. I have been working on these patterns (on and off) since the fall of 2016, leading a team of five authors. My co-authors are Daniel Lübke, Mirko Stocker, Cesare Pautasso and Uwe Zdun.
The authors team is extremely happy that Vaughn Vernon, author of “Implementing Domain-Driven Design”, “Domain-Driven Design Distilled” etc., accepted it for his Signature Series. Vaughn has very nice things to say about it on Twitter and LinkedIn and so has Frank Leymann in his Foreword, cited on the landing page for the book at Pearson. 😇
In the book, we emphasize microservices less than on our pattern website. Its 44 patterns certainly are applicable when architecting service-oriented systems and Web APIs, but also when creating message-based remote APIs in other settings. The book contains patterns that cover topics such as endpoint roles, message structure, API quality and evolution. It also provides an introduction to API fundamentals, a domain model for APIs, and a decision model identifying pattern selection questions, options and criteria. A third part applies the patterns to real-world cases.
The Table of Contents is available here.
More Information
To learn more about our pattern language, you can watch my co-author Daniel Lübke in a 24-minute video interview in Erik Wilde’s “Getting APIs to Work”. The example pattern featured in the video is Pagination.
Another post collects entry points into our pattern language. And (edited) sample content can be found at InformIT.
Read more about these great news on the API design patterns website. This is the home page of the book at InformIT. There is a Medium version of this post.
Please contact me if you have questions or comments. Stay tuned!
– Olaf (in MAP Author role)