Talk:Wikimedia Apps/App Services

MVP & Scope

Instead of replacing the entire API at once, can't we write a micro service that just replaces, for example, search? I think the scope is already too large, and focusing services on a feature level should facilitate keeping the services small (SOA) and shipping it quickly. BGerstle (WMF) (talk)

API versioning approaches

Content Type

RESTBase generally uses MIME type versioning like this:

 application/json; profile=mediawiki.org/specs/app_page_bundle/1.0.0

This is spec'd in the Swagger spec & enforced by RESTBase. On version mismatch from stored content, the backend service is called to re-generate or upgrade the content, which is then saved back. It can be passed the stored content to make re-generation more efficient.

If needed, clients could also signal the content-type they expect with an accept header. The details of how things would then be upgraded / downgraded would need to be worked out in case you really need this. In general, you can go a long way by only adding properties while remaining backwards-compatible with the old properties.

We also distinguish stability per end point:

• experimental end points can change at any time (effectively private, use at your own risk)
• unstable end points can change, but we make an effort to avoid breakage and notify users of
• stable any change to stable end points will increment the major API version (/v1/) following semver

URL component

For example /v1/resource/... versus /v2/resource/....