In the following set of design patterns, rather than looking at addressing a specific, narrowly scoped problem, we’ll instead explore broader topics that are applicable to almost all APIs. These core design patterns will set the stage for designing good APIs, but we’ll also rely on them as building blocks for the design patterns we’ll see later on.
In chapter 6, we’ll start by looking at how the resources in our APIs can be uniquely identified. Then, in chapters 7 through 9, we’ll define a core set of interaction patterns with standard and custom methods (as well as learning how these apply when operating on subsets of a resource). In chapter 10, we’ll learn how to handle API methods that might take a long time to complete with LROs and, finally, chapter 11 will cover how to manage repeated work in APIs with rerunnable jobs.