Homework 8

As this course transitions to looking cloud-scale applications, web APIs are incredibly important for both consuming APIs that others have built and for creating new APIs that others will use.

In lecture, you learned there is no standard API documentation format. However, many APIs follow similar best practices that have proven useful for developers. This week, you will survey various APIs that exist in the wild and discuss similarities you find between them and distill those similarities into three “best practices” you identify for web APIs.

API Review List

To get started, review the following APIs. The first three are considered some of the best APIs that exist, while the final two are APIs for services local to UIUC and Champaign-Urbana:

• Stripe API, https://stripe.com/docs/api
• GitHub API, https://docs.github.com/en/rest
• National Weather Service API, https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api
• CUMTD (local bus system) API, https://developer.cumtd.com/
• Queue@Illinois API, https://github.com/illinois/queue/blob/master/doc/API.md

In addition, review at least two additional APIs not included on the list above.

Homework

Write up a summary of what you find similar about the APIs, elements that you find helpful and unhelpful, and a what two (or more) APIs you reviewed beyond the list of required API. At the end, three one-sentence “best practices” as a numbered list of elements you would want to have in any API you develop or use.

Submit your homework as a Markdown file named hw8.md in the root of your CS 240 repository, formatted in Markdown. When viewed on github.com, the content should be approximately a page long in “print preview” and your summary should be at least 300 words.