I was reading through the RABL git https://github.com/nesquena/rabl and I quickly came across this line. Can someone quickly explain what he means by “generating APIs”?
- When using the ActiveRecord ‘to_json’ method, I tend to quickly find myself wanting a more expressive and powerful solution for generating APIs.
From my understanding an API is a set of classes / methods that may be used to interact with the content of the API creators material. With that definition, I believe he is saying that he wants to be able to interact easier with the API so he build RABL which allows for the content to be translated from his application to, in this case, Rails eaiser?
In this case, API is applied to the system as a whole. So your entire website might have an API that your customers would use to pull/send data to your system.
Mostly, these are JSON/XML endpoints that accept and return data. Rabl (and other serializers like it), help you craft custom JSON responses.