Phil Sturgeon

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API

HTTP/REST API File Uploads

File uploads are one thing that always feel rather complicated, and working out how to handle this in an API doesn't make life easier. For many programmers, this has been abstracted away behind the HTTP standard, HTML and convenient features in languages like PHP, that populate a $_FILES

HTTP Status Codes Are Not Enough

I spotted an article called Just learn Rails (Part 3) HTTP status codes. It started off good, and I liked that it was teaching people to avoid hardcoding their HTTP status codes in code, using :conflict instead of 409 and the like. That is a good message to send, which

Auto-Incrementing IDs: Giving API Data Away

Something we're always taught as developers, usually by tutorials or via the defaults in various ORM tools, is every SQL table needs an auto-incrementing ID. This is a weirdly common fallacy, enforced by old tutorials, new tutorials and half-arsed tooling in various forms. Why are auto-incrementing IDs a

The Importance of Serializing API Output

The Importance of Serializing API Output

I've given the API Pain Points talk a bazillion times over the last year. In just 2015 I gave it at: * Lone Star PHP * OpenWest * ConFoo One section that seems to get a lot of feedback and questions is when I talk about serialization, which I refer to

Dredd: Do Your HTTP API Justice

Dredd: Do Your HTTP API Justice

Update 2021-02-08: Old post is old! I really don't recommend messing with Dredd anymore, it was a handy stepping stone on the way to contract testing with API descriptions but these days using OpenAPI v3.x and using those descriptions to power contract testing in your existing test

RESTful API Deletions, Restorations and Revisions

Two weeks ago I posted RESTful URLs: Actions Need Not Apply which was all about how the only action/verb to appear in the HTTP Request should be the HTTP Method itself (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, HEAD, etc). This was figured out as myself and others were working on complex

PHP API's: Fractal of GOOD Design

Recently I started a new blog series called "Build API's That You Wont Hate", starting off with Part 1 - Useful Database Seeding. It was meant to be a fleshed out series based off of my experiences over the last several years building nontrivial RESTful API&