Should a website use its own public API?

Question

I am starting to write a webservice, and I've built with nodeJS and a RESTfulish approach.

From what I gather:

• The advantage is that you don't have to duplicate code.
• The disadvantages are that you:
  • will update the public API frequently, but should be solved with versioning
  • can't really make service specific caching and optimizations

What is considered best practice? Do sites such as Stack Exchange, Github, Twitter, etc use their own APIs for their clients?

Answer 1

You should absolutely use your own API. This concept is widely known as dogfooding and it has many benefits beyond avoiding code duplciation.

• Consistent behaviour between your site/product and what API consumers will write (ie. their expectations of your API)
• Another form of testing.
• You can and will find bugs in the API before your customers do, making their resolutions cost less.

Although I would argue against one of your points: you should not be updating the API frequently. Spend the time to architect and proof out an API that will stay around for a while. Fortunately, dogfooding in this way will enforce that. Where you would have just broken customer code before, you'll now be breaking your own code. When you must, yes versioning is a solution, but it should be avoided.

Answer 2

for some reason it won't let me log in as the poster of the question, but it was me. I can't accept your answer, wish I could, it makes a lot of sense.

However, how can you not want to update your API? What about adding new features, removing unpopular ones, refactoring, etc?