GOTO Berlin is a vendor independent international software development conference with more that 60 top speaker and 400 attendees. The conference cover topics such as Java, Open Source, Agile, Architecture, Design, Web, Cloud, New Languages and Processes.

Ben Barnard, Software developer at Nokia

Ben Barnard

Biography: Ben Barnard

Ben Barnard has worked as a software developer on four continents, currently with Nokia in Berlin and earlier with ThoughtWorks and iQmetrix. Having been enchanted by the magic of programming at an early age and later encountering the power of abstraction and test-driven development, Ben is passionate about developing quality software, learning new things, and having fun in the process. He enjoys new languages, be they programming or natural, and has spent some time learning and teaching them.

Presentation: Building, Running and Promoting a Public API

Track: Web APIs / Time: Friday 13:20 - 14:10 / Location: Estrelsaal C7

In this session we are going to share our experience gained while designing and implementing

the Nokia Places API, a public web API used by Nokia-internal application development teams,

external parties with commercial contracts, as well as long-tail developers. We spent six months on initial

development and have been releasing regularly for the two years since.

This experience has yielded interesting lessons about iterative API design,

managing API stability while adding new functionality, and supporting and attracting external clients.

 

Specifically we are going to talk about:

 

* Extensibility and what we might have done differently

* Documentation and how we tried make the API self-explanatory

* Consistency and how Scala helped us to enforce interface patterns

* Backwards compatibility and how we evolved our test strategy to avoid breaking existing clients

* Incompatible changes and how we mitigated the inevitable