The API hierarchy of needs is inspired by the work of Abraham Maslow, a psychologist who created a theory that explains how human needs are fulfilled — the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
API Hierarchy of Needs
While Maslow’s goal was to understand and explain the priorities of human needs, from breathing and feeding to self-esteem and morality, the API hierarchy of needs explains different characteristics that make an API usable.
The only thing that we know for certain about the future is that things will change, and that is especially true in our industry. If your APIs are successful they will be used in ways you never had foreseen and the data you deliver will be combined with other data in very surprising ways.
photo by Bruce Denis
At the same time technology will change and what your organisation can and want to deliver to its customers will change. In order to keep relevant and to keep serving these ever evolving needs and requirements your APIs need to change and you need to know how to handle these changes.
What exactly is Content Negotiation? According to Wikipedia it’s “a mechanism defined in the HTTP specification that makes it possible to serve different versions of a document at the same URI, so that user agents can specify which version fit their capabilities the best”.
photo by JD Hancock
So, it serves two purposes: (1) making it possible to have different versions of the same response, and (2) letting clients specify which version they want to receive. Usually, this technique is applied when there are several types of user agents consuming the same HTTP resource but, because they have different rendering capabilities, they might ask for different content types.
Full disclosure: I was born and live in the USA, American English is my native language, and I spend USD every day. However, I work with customers in 18 countries and regions on five continents, and the list is getting bigger all the time.
Operating a business in the global market is not as trivial as it might seem, if you’ve never seen it through. Everyone not only speaks different languages and has different currencies (not to mention driving on the different sides of the road), but they also have different cultural norms. In many situations, we can merely provide raw values for dates and currency and avoid formatting. However, when content includes localizable information, especially dates and currencies, display formatting needs to be sensitive to the localized culture.
If you’re considering making the jump off of your own soil to the rest of the globe, hopefully this will give you some insights.
At a first glance you might think that offering an API method that returns information about your application users might not be a good idea. With the increasing usage of APIs for business related purposes you might fear that you’re giving away precious information about your customers.
photo by The Wide Wide World
But think again. If you give the right amount of information, applications built on top of your API will be able to offer a better service to your users. Your final user will have a better experience and that might turn out to generate more business for you.