[The API Book] Weekly Digest 2023–05–26

[The API Book] Weekly Digest 2023–05–26

“The API Patterns” section is officially finished! Three last chapters:

Chapter 23. Atomicity of Bulk Changes

The design of the orders/bulk-status-change endpoint, as described in the previous chapter, raises an interesting question: what should we do if some changes were successfully processed by our backend while others were not?

Chapter 24. Partial Updates

What if the operation involves a low-level overwriting of several data fields rather than an atomic idempotent procedure (as in the case of changing the order status)? Let’s take a look at the following example.

Chapter 25. Degradation and Predictability

But let’s ask ourselves a question: what does a “more predictable system” mean? For an API vendor, the answer is simple: the distribution and number of errors are both indicators of technical problems (if the numbers are growing unexpectedly) and KPIs for technical refactoring (if the numbers are decreasing after the release).

However, for partner developers, the concept of “API predictability” means something completely different.