Development Techniques

API development is as complicated as the tools you use to make it happen. By following the steps presented in this chapter, you’ll be able to use the right tools for different stages of development. You’ll learn about the differences between mocking and prototyping and why prototyping is closer to having a final API server running. You’ll also understand how you can choose the right programming language and framework for your API product. With that information, you’ll be able to generate running API server code from an existing machine-readable definition document.

We’ll start this chapter by recalling what we’ve already learned about API mocking. You’ll understand that mocking is mostly used for validating an API design.

Once the design has been validated, you can create a prototype of your API server. You’ll understand that the goal of prototyping is to have something running quickly. And to achieve...