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The REDCAMEL Approach for Designing APIs

Explore the REDCAMEL approach to API design, which guides you through understanding requirements, making design decisions, defining API models, evaluating non-functional needs, and estimating latency. This lesson helps you structure API development methodically for robust and efficient services.

We'll cover the following...

Introduction

Designing an API for a service is a complex task, and no universal algorithm exists to model an optimal API for a system. It requires thorough analysis and understanding of the users' requirements and the workflow of the overall system.

Identifying the requirements allows us to make different design decisions, such as architectural styles, data formats, protocols and their versions, and so on. In this course, we devise an approach called REDCAMELRE: Requirements, DC: Design considerations, AM: API model, E: Evaluating non-functional requirements, and L: Latency budget. that governs the design of an API for a service.

The REDCAMEL acronym

We’re going to use the REDCAMEL approach in the coming chapters as we design various APIs. We’ll expand on the REDCAMEL approach in the following sections.

Requirements (RE)

In the requirements lessons, we identify the functional and non-functional requirements of the API to be designed. This helps us identify the functionalities we need to address while designing an API. Further, we also ...