The quest for a better API
Hi everyone, I added these two ideas: "API-first" development REST API versioning should be actually used I would appreciate your help in voting them up if you agree with them. Thanks...
Forum Discussion
Well that's the problem... By targeting "vc" with API calls, you remove all possibilities of upgrading the API without breaking something.
When you write something that calls "/restapi/vc/foo", and the foo call needs some change, it will break that code when you change the version vc tartgets.
If, however, you define that from now on "vc" = "v1" and always allow older API versions, my code cannot break even if the new API versions don't have the "foo" call.
In that situation, once I have working enterprise glue code, I never need to change it to use new versions of the API, since it's working as I want and the old API calls remain available.. If I want to use a new API version, I can use the new versions only for the calls I'm changing.
So my point is that providing "vc" is a misfeature.
"vc" doesn't point to the current version of the REST API, but to a "configured" version of the REST API that will never change unless you want it changed, so basically "vc" is already always locked to "v1" unless you want it to change, in which case we can change it. You can start using v1 in your calls if you want to and those calls will not be affected if you have us change "vc" to point to a different version later on. You can also choose to have us keep "vc" pointing at "v1" forever, effectively doing what you want (vc = v1). "vc" is there for cases where you want to do a mass upgrade of all API calls from one verison of the API to another version of the API. If you only want to change calls one-by-one to a specific version, you can do so at your leasure.
