#Oh the things you can do… with an API!
Most successful companies on the web today from Amazon to Dropbox to Google to Twitter expose some kind of API to their users to write their own applications and interact with their application programmatically. They expose an even deeper API for their internal teams.
Even Dries recognizes the importance of being able to output data in different formats and now Drupal has an awesome Web Services and Context Core Initiative
With Drupal, your site doesn't have to be big, or small, or even cool to have an API. It just has to be running Drupal! (So by definition it would be cool anyways).
In this session we'll delve into a discussion of APIs built using the Services Module. We'll talk about how internal APIs can be leveraged to transform your website into an SOA application and how external APIs can bring more adoption and flexibility to your online application. We'll talk about the definition of a true RESTful API and how to design your APIs to conform to those principles as well as the business logic of your website.
We'll talk about the structure of the services module and how it works on the inside and at the end of the session we'll take a look at how to define your APIs in code!
Questions?
- Why do I even need / want an API?
- How do I design an API?
- How do I successfuly leverage APIs internally in my web application?
- How do I make the people developing on my external API want to develop on my external API?
- How do I actually code a services API?
This will be a quick introduction on building APIs with the services module.
We will discuss a few things:
We will touch on the things that can be done with an api, ranging from how it can be used internally to how it can help your site grow.
Then we will go into some API design principles and RESTful API design.
And finally we'll get to see the guts of an API built with services!!