Principles & Best Practices of REST API Design, the UAE Launched an API Marketplace, the Ethics of APIs

This is issue 2021.47 of the API Changelog, a weekly mix of API news, commentary, and opinion. In this issue, you’ll get to know the most relevant API-related news from the week of November 22, 2021. Subscribe now so you never miss an issue of the API Changelog.

Funding and M&A

OnePipe, a fintech API company, raised $3.5M in a Seed round. Atlantica Ventures led the investment, with participation from Tribe Capital, V&R Associates, Canaan Partners, and Techstars, among others.

Fonoa, a tax automation API company, raised $20.5M in a Series A round. OMERS Ventures led the investment, with participation from Index Ventures, FJ Labs, and Moving Capital, among others.

Svix, a webhook-as-a-service (WaaS) provider, raised $2.6M in a pre-Seed round. Y Combinator led the round, with participation from Aleph, among others.

Ericsson announced the acquisition of Vonage for a reported $6.2B. The acquisition will expand Ericsson’s “presence in wireless enterprise and broaden its global offerings.” The operation is expected to be completed in the first half of 2022.

Commercetools announced the acquisition of Frontastic. The acquisition will expand commerce tools’ “ability to more quickly deploy e-commerce front-end interfaces on top of its headless commerce technology platform.”

Announcements

Enterprise times reported that eight companies joined the MACH alliance. The companies are Actindo, Appnovation, Builder, Convictional, GraphCMS, Object Edge, and Storyblok. “MACH stands for Micro-services-based, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS and Headless.”

GraphCMS also announced separately that they’re joining MACH. “As part of the MACH alliance, GraphCMS will work closely with the other members to guide companies on how they can benefit from a lean and modular approach to enterprise technologies.”

Gulf News reported that the UAE launched an API marketplace. “The UAE government launched the first partnership on the platform between the Federal Tax Authority, the Telecommunications Regulatory and Digital Government Authority, and Amazon. Through this partnership, services of the FTA will be linked directly to Amazon systems, thus promoting operations’ automation and accelerating sellers’ registration in Amazon store in the UAE.” Emirates News Agency added that “the aim is to empower companies and vendors through simplifying business and government processes and accelerating the digital transformation of the e-commerce sector.”

Fintech

Deutsche Bank launched a Swift Beneficiary Account Verification (BAV) API. With this launch, Deutsche Bank lets its clients verify account details before a payment transfer is started. Finextra reports that “Deutsche Bank is the first to roll out the system on a global basis, building a straightforward API layer on top, enabling it to validate accounts across its global markets in real-time.”

Analytics Insight published a report of what they consider the top cryptocurrency APIs. Coinbase, CoinGecko, and CoinMarketCap are a part of the list of 10 APIs.

API-first

Graham F. Scott, a Senior Product Content Designer at Shopify, wrote a piece explaining how they have reorganized around developer goals. In “Build the thing: an IA model for organizing documentation,” Graham shows how to center your Information Architecture around what developers are looking for. Among other things, they have integrated examples directly in their API reference.

Grant Gadomski, Developer Chapter Lead at Vanguard, published an article where he advocates for a better Developer Experience. “Design Your APIs for Humans, Not Just Other Systems” guides you through the advantages of creating APIs that appeal to consumers. Grant believes you should follow a Human-Centered Design approach by applying the steps of empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping and testing, and finally iterating if needed.

Lori MacVittie, Principal Technical Evangelist at F5, wrote “Governing a Growing API Portfolio.” Lori defends that multiple considerations are needed to address API Governance. Versioning, access control, and secret management are the most important things to consider, according to the article.

Michael Bogan, from Dev Spotlight, published “API Prototyping for Salesforce with Postman.” In this article, Michael explains how you can prototype an API using Salesforce Apex language and Postman.

Practice

Love Sharma wrote “Principles & Best practices of REST API Design.” In this article, Love shares the principles, constraints, and best practices of REST API Design.

Vasco Veloso wrote “Is SOLID Still Relevant in Modern Software Architecture?”, where he shares his opinion about following the SOLID principles in contemporary software architectures.

Ajay Kapoor wrote “API Integration: The Top API Benefits for your Business.” The benefits of APIs are, according to Ajay, easy integration, decreased implementation effort, automation of business processes, and improvement of customer services, among others.

Prakhar S wrote “Testing APIs Using Postman,” where he does a step-by-step guide to how you can use Postman to test APIs. Prakhar also wrote “Building REST APIs using Flask,” where he explains how you can build a REST API from scratch using Flask.

Rinagreen wrote “A source-code repository as a starting point for API documentation.” This article shares a strategy for finding API information by inspecting a code repository.

Rajat Thakur wrote “Network Automation & REST-based APIS,” where he explores how you can automate network-related tasks using REST APIs.

Daffodil Software wrote “SOAP vs REST API: 5 Differences You Need To Know,” where they highlight the differences between SOAP and REST API. They consider differences in areas such as the design model, operation state, bandwidth usage, and data formats.

Julio Fernandez wrote “Open-source cloud-native visibility tool for APIs.” The article shares information about APIClarity, an open-source tool from Cisco. The author links videos with in-depth information about APIClarity.

Daud Samim wrote “Build a REST API with Laravel API resources.” In this article, Daud shows you how to build a REST API from scratch with Laravel’s API resources.

Julia Bellmer wrote “Hyrum’s Law — the Murphy’s Law for APIs,” where she describes Hyrum’s law and how it can affect your API Design decisions.

Thiago Pacheco wrote “Create a Restful API with Golang from scratch,” where he shows you how to build a REST API from scratch with Golang.

Juan Bautista Cabota Soro wrote “GraphQL Proof of Concept in Mercadona.” In this article, Juan shares the story of how Mercadona, a supermarket chain, implemented GraphQL at scale.

Security

Lia Elwonger wrote “The Dream of Open Data and the Ethics of APIs.” The article explores how APIs are opening access to data that would otherwise be hidden. One factor to consider is the ethics involved in allowing third parties to access and share data.

Raiffeisen Bank International shares its journey to API Security. The article explains how Raiffeisen implemented internal programs, so they could take charge of their API Security Lifecycle.

SD Times published a piece on how following a developer-first approach can impact security. The article concludes that “security-as-code” can be seen as an advantage.