Our Book "Patterns for API Design"

Simplifying Integration with Loosely Coupled Message Exchanges, Addison-Wesley Professional, Vaughn Vernon Signature Series (November 8, 2022)

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Patterns for API Design Cover and Highlights

Content Highlights

Chapter 1 of the book contains an introduction to API fundamentals and a domain model for APIs. Six architectural decision narratives guide through the conceptual level of API design, identifying 29 recurring decisions with options and criteria (Chapter 2). Chapter 3 introduces a sample case.

Part 2 of our book features 44 patterns in its Chapters 4 to 9:

Patterns for API Design Part 2 Content

Chapter 10 presents two real-world systems in which pattern instances can be found; Chapter 11 is a retrospective and outlook. A pattern eligibility cheat sheet is included in the book as well (Appendix A). Its online predecessor is available here. Appendix B provides implementation artifacts from the sample case.

Appendix C is an introduction to the Microservice Domain Specific Language (MDSL) that we used to illustrate many of our refactorings. It applies the patterns to three cases, the fictitious Lakeside Mutual microservices scenario as well as two real-world projects that have been running in productions for a long time.

Sample book content is featured in “What is the Right Service Granularity in APIs?” at InformIT. The two Forewords, Preface, Chapter 7, and Index are also available for download.

Table of Contents

See this page for the full table of contents.

Endorsements and Pattern Adoption

Vaughn Vernon provided the Series Foreword and Frank Leymann the external one.

We also received testimonials from Andrei Furda, James Higginbotham, Rick Kazman, Ipek Ozkaya, Peter Sommerlad, Gernot Starke, Uwe van Heesch, Eric Wilde, and Eoin Woods (in alphabetical order). Also see this LinkedIn thread.

A separate page on this website collects pattern adoption stories contributed by readers that complement the two in Chapter 10 of our book (see Table of Contents).

Bibtex Citation

To cite the book, the following Bibtex entry can be used:

@book{PatternsForAPIDesign:2022,
  title     = {Patterns for API Design: Simplifying Integration with Loosely Coupled Message Exchanges},
  author    = {Zimmermann, Olaf and Stocker, Mirko and L{\"u}bke, Daniel and Zdun, Uwe and Pautasso, Cesare},
  year      = 2022,
  publisher = {Addison-Wesley Professional},
  series    = {Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Vernon)},
  isbn      = 9780137670109
}

News

For updates, please have a look at the News page.