Evolving an API Design
Explore approaches to evolving API design that maintain compatibility while supporting new features. Understand how adding methods, filtering results, and bulk endpoints improve scalability and resource use. This helps you create flexible, resilient APIs suited to growing and changing client needs.
What is API evolution?
API evolution refers to the process of making changes to an API over time while maintaining compatibility with existing client applications. This involves introducing new features, deprecating old ones, and making other modifications that enhance the functionality of the API, without causing any disruption to its users. The goal of API evolution is to keep the API current and relevant, while ensuring that it remains usable by existing clients.
In this lesson, we’ll take a look at some approaches that may help us evolve our API.
Changing data access patterns
As an API gets popular, the consumers of the API might begin to use it in a way that was not initially anticipated by the designers.
Let's take the example of Twitter. A few years ago, the Twitter application could only receive new tweets in real-time by constantly ...