Overview
Traditional product design is channel and device centric. But users inhabit a multi-channel, multi-device world.
Channel and/or device centric product design results in duplicated effort and wasted engineering work. API-first development is focused on removing this technical debt through the separation of the data backend and the data consuming front end.
API-first development is the idea that whenever you are developing a piece of shared functionality for your organization it should be exposed as a RESTful HTTP(S) API to all of your other developers. Rather than creating a library or module that needs to be added to all code bases requiring the functionality, developers can consume all the necessary functionality through the API. Having developers consume all functionality through an API enforces separation of concerns and hides internal complexity.
COPE stands for Create Once, Publish Everywhere. It is about reducing editorial overhead by freeing content for use in multiple different contexts. Simply put, COPE separates data from design, making your content reusable and future-proof for new devices or platforms.
Taking an API-first development approach enables COPE and brings several additional benefits:
- Separation of concerns
- Scalability
- Reduction of language barriers
- Developer liberation and specialization
- Openness and future consumer availability
- Modularity
1. Separation of concerns
API-first development is the formal separation of the front end from the back end.
Similar to the Model View Controller paradigm, by decoupling data from logic from presentation, it forces a better code architecture, which in the long term decreases your technical debt. API-first development makes it easy to push data to multiple views, regardless of size or functionality.
Knowledge
Last Updated:
September 2019
