# Architecture principles whose scope is API

> 38 records

This index as JSON: https://banes-lab.com/json/api/facets/architecture/scope/api

## Entries

- [Design by Contract](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/design-by-contract.md): A design rule that every operation states the preconditions it needs, the postconditions it guarantees and the invariants it keeps.
- [Explicit Contracts](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/explicit-contracts.md): A design rule that every boundary declares the shape and meaning of what crosses it in a typed contract.
- [Stable Interfaces](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/stable-interfaces.md): The degree to which a public interface keeps its signatures and meaning across releases.
- [Contract-First Design](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/contract-first-design.md): A design rule that a boundary's contract is written and agreed before the implementation behind it.
- [API Contract](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/api-contract.md): A rule or precondition that each endpoint declares its request, response and error shapes in a versioned schema.
- [Schema Contract](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/schema-contract.md): A rule or precondition that every payload is validated against a machine-readable schema at the boundary it crosses.
- [Semantic Contracts](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/semantic-contracts.md): A rule or precondition that each term and value at a boundary has one agreed meaning, beyond its type.
- [Preconditions](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/preconditions.md): A rule or precondition that must hold on an operation's input and state before the operation runs.
- [Backward Compatibility](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/backward-compatibility.md): A rule or precondition that a new version keeps working for consumers written against an older one.
- [Forward Compatibility](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/forward-compatibility.md): A rule or precondition that an older reader accepts data from a newer writer by ignoring the fields it does not know rather than failing on them.
- [Versioning](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/versioning.md): A mechanism that labels each release of an interface or schema, so consumers can tell compatible changes from breaking ones.
- [Interoperability](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/interoperability.md): The degree to which separate systems exchange data and use it correctly through shared formats and contracts.
- [Uniform Interface](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/uniform-interface.md): A rule or precondition that every resource in an API uses the same verbs, response shapes and error format.
- [Consumer-Driven Contracts](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/consumer-driven-contracts.md): A rule or precondition that a provider verifies each change against the expectations its consumers have recorded.
- [Predictability](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/predictability.md): The degree to which a caller can foresee what an operation does from its interface and contract.
- [Specification-Based Testing](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/specification-based-testing.md): The activity of deriving tests from a specification's stated behavior, independently of how the code implements it.
- [Robustness Principle](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/robustness-principle.md): A design rule that a component is strict in what it sends and tolerant of harmless variation in what it receives.
- [Impact Analysis](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/impact-analysis.md): The activity of tracing a change through the dependency graph to find every consumer it affects.
- [Self-Describing API](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/self-describing-api.md): A design rule that an API publishes machine-readable descriptions of its operations, payloads and errors.
- [Builder Pattern](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/builder-pattern.md): A design pattern that assembles a complex object step by step through named calls and validates it when it is built.
- [Facade Pattern](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/facade-pattern.md): A design pattern that gives a subsystem one simple entry point, so callers do not depend on its parts.
- [Caching](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/caching.md): A design pattern that stores the result of an expensive read or computation under a key derived from every input it depends on, and serves it again while that key matches.
- [Latency](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/latency.md): A measure of the time between a request and its response, usually reported at percentiles.
- [Rate Limiting](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/rate-limiting.md): A mechanism that caps how many requests a caller can make in a time window and rejects the excess.
- [Schema Validation](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/schema-validation.md): A mechanism that parses incoming data against a schema at the boundary and rejects any payload that does not conform.
- [Type Safety](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/type-safety.md): A mechanism that has the compiler reject operations on values of the wrong type before the code runs.
- [Canonical Schema](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/canonical-schema.md): A formal definition of one concept's shape, published once and used by every API, message and store that carries the concept.
- [Semantic Consistency](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/semantic-consistency.md): The degree to which one name carries one meaning across the code, the schemas and the documentation.
- [Intent-Revealing Interface](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/intent-revealing-interface.md): A design rule that an operation's name and parameters state what it does for the caller.
- [Principle of Least Surprise](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/principle-of-least-surprise.md): A design rule that an operation behaves the way its name and its conventions lead a caller to expect.
- [Secure by Default](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/secure-by-default.md): A design rule that every setting ships in its most restrictive safe state, and weakening one requires an explicit opt-in.
- [Attack Surface Reduction](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/attack-surface-reduction.md): A design rule that endpoints, ports, features and permissions nothing uses are removed or disabled.
- [Authentication](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/authentication.md): A mechanism that verifies a caller's claimed identity from a credential before any protected action runs.
- [Authorization](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/authorization.md): A mechanism that decides, from a policy, whether an authenticated principal may perform an action on a resource.
- [Access Control](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/access-control.md): A mechanism that evaluates an access policy for each request to a resource and denies the request when the policy does not allow it.
- [Input Validation](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/input-validation.md): A mechanism that checks external input against a schema at the boundary before core logic uses it.
- [Output Encoding](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/output-encoding.md): A mechanism that escapes values for the context they are written into, such as HTML, SQL or a shell.
- [Idempotency](https://banes-lab.com/records/architecture/idempotency.md): A design rule that repeating an operation with the same input has the same effect as running it once.