Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Welcome to Codidact Meta!

Codidact Meta is the meta-discussion site for the Codidact community network and the Codidact software. Whether you have bug reports or feature requests, support questions or rule discussions that touch the whole network – this is the site for you.

Comments on How should a Codidact public API work?

Post

How should a Codidact public API work?

+8
−0

I'm planning to add a public API to Codidact so people can make applications that read Codidact data automatically.

Features and purposes

I have my own purposes in mind for this[1], but there are many other potential uses. Before I start building this, I'd like to hear what features you would like the API to have, and what purposes you might use it for.

General thoughts

Even if you are not planning anything yet, I would still like to hear your thoughts on what might be useful for the future. I'm hoping this discussion will help avoid designing an API that is too specific, or that needs breaking changes later.

Whatever your thoughts, please share them. This could be any of the following or anything else you want to bring up:

  • Ideas for projects you might make one day
  • Thoughts on the structure of an API
  • Things to bear in mind / avoid (I'm new to this, so things that are obvious to you may not be obvious to me)
  • Preferred data format(s)
  • What to include from the start and what can wait until later
  • Limits, such as how many results to permit in a single response (like pagination) and how to handle requesting more

  1. I'll add my own personal API requirements in an answer. Please comment on the answer if there's a better approach I should consider. ↩︎

History
Why does this post require moderator attention?
You might want to add some details to your flag.
Why should this post be closed?

4 comment threads

Can be it used with "Approach zero" math-aware search engine? (1 comment)
Licencing (19 comments)
What kind of API? (3 comments)
Reference (1 comment)
Reference
Karl Knechtel‭ wrote 9 months ago

FWIW, Microsoft offers what I found to be an excellent reference guide for API design: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/best-practices/api-design. The arguments are simple and clear, and I found myself consistently agreeing with them.