How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters

Google Tech Talks
January 24, 2007

ABSTRACT

Every day around the world, software developers spend much of their time working with a variety of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Some are integral to the core platform, some provide access to widely distributed frameworks, and some are written in-house for use by a few developers. Nearly all programmers occasionally function as API designers, whether they know it or not. A well-designed API can be a great asset to the organization that wrote it and to all who use it. Good APIs increase the pleasure and productivity of the developers who use them, the quality of the software they produce, and ultimately, the corporate bottom line....

• Category

  Howto & Style

[leostera]

240p...we meet again.

[Jonathan Roberts]

Josh is even better in person. His sense of programming aesthetics is strong and they inform his entire being. Even his daily speech is type-safe and semantically precise; he often corrects himself to achieve these goals. He hired me into my first programming job at Transarc in 1990. Working with him was like going to graduate school for CS. To top it all off, Josh is friendly, interesting, funny and of excellent character. It is good to hear that he still quotes Jon Bentley.

[Jerónimo Barraco Mármol]

I wish Google itself attended this before making Android API.

[SyntaxColoring]

I'm not so sure about that. I agree that protected is often underused, but I wouldn't say that private members are inherently bad. They're good to use, for example, when the public methods of a superclass are engineered to safely manipulate the object's internal state to maintain some invariant. You don't want that internal state to just be protected, because then subclasses can circumvent the carefully-designed public methods and mess it up by accessing it directly without any checks.

[TR NS]

DO NOT make all your Java members private! That is idiotic. In fact private members is the biggest mistake of all time!!! It totally destorys code reusability. Instead of private make them protected. This way subclasses can still access them, but they aren't public API either.

[zisispon]

I think sound is out of sync :/

[ericcartmansh]

Not found.