Putting pieces together

[Johan Chouquet]

Hi,

I'm a bit new to APIs and backends. So I try to learn a lot where I can gather some info.

For now, I discovered there are a lot of BaaS, or actors like Apigee (Apiary.io for example) for APIs.  At the time being, the line between APIs services like Apigee and BaaS like StackMob or Parse is a bit blur.

I also found these very interesting links :

http://pages.apigee.com/rs/apigee/images/api-facade-pattern-ebook-2012-06.pdf for building an API facade, and http://pages.apigee.com/rs/apigee/images/api-design-ebook-2012-03.pdf for starting the API dev. At last, I followed a webinar with Tim Anglade from Apigee. Very interesting.

I followed principles of writing error codes, and stub data as examples. I'll write down the base URLs, but my feeling is that I'll have to write quite some code in a Backend server to handle format, pagination, versioning etc...

Right now, I'm wondering : how can I put all the pieces together ? Where do I start from ?

Is that OK if I start directly with services at Apigee for example ?

Does Apigee provides this kind of support / functionalities : pagination, versioning, partial responses etc... ?

Or in fact, does Apigee provide a very nice and simple way of creating an API and behind it I still need some backend server, with a url like : http://api.mydomain.com ?

Thank you for your help.

Johan