API-first and REST, can they complement each other?

In a time where the quality demand on web services gets higher and higher, but time to market is equally important, API-first has established itself as the silver bullet. However, the API design process is a difficult one that requires a lot of thought and rigour. A backwards-incompatible API change can easily become very expensive when an API is critical enough.

In this talk we will focus on the API design process, its intricacies, the standards that you have to absolutely be familiar with and last, but not least, testing. Given Apache Sling’s URL parsing rules, we will show how control-plane APIs can co-exist with the delivery APIs and how we can make sure that we test both the API definition and the implementation.

After the talk, the attendees should have a better understanding of how a well designed API looks like, get a list of tried and tested Java libraries that can be used for validating APIs on top of Apache Sling and see how other companies in the field manage the APIs they make public.