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Ryan Haber
Ryan Haber

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Customizable APIs?

Hey All,

I've met some of you - my background is designing, testing, and supporting APIs - and now technical product management. But I'm not gonna pretend I'm an amazing expert. I just bumped into a question and I can't find an obvious answer. I'm relaying the question here in hopes that one of my engineering betters (that's you):

  • has thought of it before and can point me to a resource,
  • thinks it's a crazy, nonsensical question and can explain to me like I'm five,
  • thinks it's a really intriguing question worth thinking through.

Here's the question:

Is there such a thing as a per-application customizable API?

The more I think about it, the more I think, yeah, sure, that can make sense. A REST API might be "customized" - when you create objects in Salesforce for instance, you can later access them by endpoints determined in the course of creating the objects. Each deployment of Salesforce will have its own set of endpoints.

And then not all APIs are REST APIs. And RPC might be "customized" by a config file passed to it, for instance.

I'm kinda just brainstorming here. But is this ignorant, crazy talk?

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