4 posts tagged with "API"

The CFPB put out a proposal last fall for what's being called open banking, and it has been on my mind since. The idea is that clients should be able to share their financial data with third parties through secure APIs, and that banks should be required to make that possible. I read most regulatory proposals trying to picture what I'll eventually have to build. This one I read as someone who has spent years building data plumbing, and from that angle it's the most interesting thing to cross my desk in a while.

In the previous posts, I covered what REST is and how resources and methods work. Now let's look at what makes an API robust: status codes that communicate clearly, security that protects your data, and design patterns that keep things maintainable. These are the things I wish I'd understood better when I started building APIs.

In the previous post, I covered what REST is and where it came from. Now let's look at how it actually works. This is where the principles become concrete.

I've been working with APIs for years, but I recently went back to understand REST from first principles. When you use a weather app to check the forecast, something interesting happens behind the scenes. The app sends a request to a server, the server fetches the data, and it sends back the forecast for your location. This exchange happens through an API, a set of rules that lets software applications talk to each other.

That sounds simple enough. But how do the client and server actually communicate? Many standards have been proposed over the years, but REST emerged as the dominant approach for building networked applications. I wanted to understand why.