Rails%203%20In%20Action

This chapter covers
� Building an API using new Rails 3 features
� Rate-limiting the API
� Versioning APIs
1 http://json.org.
2 http://xml.org.
Designing an API
In the past chapters, you’ve created a great application that allows your users to
manage projects and tickets through a web browser. In this chapter, you are going
to create a way for your users to manage this content through what’s known as an
Application Programming Interface (API). As its name implies, an API is a programming
interface (for your application) that returns either JavaScript Object
Notation 1 (JSON) or XML 2 data for its requests, which are the two most common
formats for modern APIs to return information in. People can then create programs
or libraries (referred to as clients) to read and present this data in any way
they see fit.
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