API Contract Design vs Ad Hoc API Design

Developers should learn API Contract Design when building or consuming APIs in distributed systems, microservices architectures, or public-facing services to prevent breaking changes and improve collaboration meets developers should use ad hoc api design in scenarios like proof-of-concept projects, internal tools with limited scope, or when experimenting with new ideas where formal design overhead is unnecessary. Here's our take.

API Contract Design

Nice Pick

Developers should learn API Contract Design when building or consuming APIs in distributed systems, microservices architectures, or public-facing services to prevent breaking changes and improve collaboration

Pros

• It is crucial for scenarios like API-first development, where teams design contracts upfront to parallelize work, and for maintaining backward compatibility in long-lived APIs
• Related to: openapi, graphql

Cons

• Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case

Ad Hoc API Design

Developers should use Ad Hoc API Design in scenarios like proof-of-concept projects, internal tools with limited scope, or when experimenting with new ideas where formal design overhead is unnecessary

Pros

• It allows for rapid iteration and flexibility, but it's not recommended for production systems, public APIs, or large-scale applications due to risks like technical debt, integration challenges, and poor developer experience
• Related to: api-design, rest-api

Cons

• Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case

The Verdict

These tools serve different purposes. API Contract Design is a concept while Ad Hoc API Design is a methodology. We picked API Contract Design based on overall popularity, but your choice depends on what you're building.

The Bottom Line

API Contract Design wins

Based on overall popularity. API Contract Design is more widely used, but Ad Hoc API Design excels in its own space.