|
|
|
|
|
|
by vishnugupta
1664 days ago
|
|
|
To take Stripe's example, the API is as documented here[1]. Essentially a documented contract between a platform provider and their clients. Implementation is things like, as you noted, DB used, programming language, and so on. By "Be conservative on APIs" they mean be careful what you promise to your clients as communicated and documented through APIs. Once promised it's almost impossible to go back; you will lose your clients' trust and piss them off. In case of Stripe they are committing to support idempotent requests[2] which is sort of a big deal. And I don't expect them to drop that support in any of their future APIs because I imagine hundreds of millions of $$ business would be relying on that idempotency support. [1] https://stripe.com/docs/api [2] https://stripe.com/docs/api/idempotent_requests |
|
|