My lightning talk on one aspect of what I think makes a great API. Given at IPRUG in March 2013.

1. Great APIs
@ChrisSinjo
IPRUG – 05/03/2013

2. A piece of a larger talk

3. Caution: Opinions ahead

4. What is “great”?
Spend most
time here Nice high level APIs
Go here when
I’m doing Powerful, underlying
something
awesome toolset

5. Git calls this “porcelain” and
“plumbing”

6. Example: get something over
HTTP

7. In my mind (psuedocode)
# Gives me the response contents as a string
print HttpLibrary.get('http://ifconfig.me/ip').body

8. In Ruby (with HTTParty)
puts HTTParty.get('http://ifconfig.me/ip').body

9. Caution: Serious, heavy-
duty, enterprise language for
people with beards ahead

10. In Java (with commonly
recommended HttpClient)
HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();
HttpGet httpget = new HttpGet("http://ifconfig.me/ip");
HttpResponse response = httpclient.execute(httpget);
HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();
if (entity != null) {
InputStream myIpStream = entity.getContent();
try {
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(
new InputStreamReader(myIpStream, Charset.forName("UTF-8")));
String nextLine;
while ((nextLine = reader.readLine()) != null) {
System.out.println(nextLine);
}
} finally {
myIpStream.close();
}
}

11. In Java (with fluent-hc wrapper)
String ip = Request.Get("http://ifconfig.me/ip")
.execute().returnContent().asString();
System.out.println(ip);

12. This isn’t a language thing
At least not entirely (syntactic flexibility aside)

13. Community focus?
Broadly:
Java: ↑ plumbing
Ruby: ↑ porcelain

14. There is more to great APIs
than this

15. Questions?