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I am building an API and I was wondering is it worth having a method in an API that returns the status of the API whether its alive or not?
Or is this pointless, and its the API users job to be able to just make a call to the method that they need and if it doesn’t return anything due to network issues they handle it as needed?
I think it’s quite useful to have a status returned. On the one hand, you can provide more statuses than ‘alive’ or not and make your API more poweful, and on the other hand, it’s more useful for the user, since you can tell him exactly what’s going on (e.g. ‘maintainance’).
But if your WebService isn’t available at all due to network issues, then, of course, it’s up to the user to catch that exception. But that’s not the point, I guess, and it’s not something you could control with your API.