Introduction When integrating with a platform that offers a REST API, a developer sometimes has the option of downloading the client library in their language of choice, or writing HTTP code themselves to integrate with the API directly. You as an API provider should decide early on if you wish to offer SDKs to your… Read More
API
From Zero To Swagger: Retrofitting an Existing REST API to an API Specification Using Swagger
Introduction Here at uShip, our web services have gone through quite a change over the last few years. We have gone from SOAP based services to a RESTful API. Recently we dipped our toes into Swagger, an API specification framework, to provide more value to our developers and external partners. Why Swagger? We originally started… Read More
An NHibernateMARE on Elm Street
We use (and generally like) the ORM NHibernate for MS SQL Server data access, but we understand why you might not. Ohhhh, the things we have seen! We’d like to share some of our favorite horrors, so that you can avoid them. Originally, our Repository<TEntity> base class implemented IEnumerable<TEntity>. This allowed us to do clever things… Read More
Implementing API Errors with Web API and FluentValidation
In a previous article, we talked about how APIs should return RESTful error responses so that API clients can act on them. There are plenty of articles like this one that talk about how to actually integrate the FluentValidation framework into the Web API pipeline, so we won’t go into the plumbing details. Below is… Read More
Actionable RESTful API Errors
No matter how hard your API clients try, they will eventually get back errors from your API. apigee has an excellent blog post describing the reasons why detailed error messages are incredibly important for API client developers when starting to consume your API. When designed and used appropriately, these errors can be immensely useful to… Read More