I've worked with Twilio's client libraries pretty much every day for the last year and I wanted to share some of the things we've learned about helper libraries.

Should you have helper libraries?

You should think about helper libraries as a more accessible interface to your API. Your helper libraries trade the details of your authentication scheme and URL structure for the ease of "do X in N lines of code." If the benefits of a more accessible interface outweigh the costs, do it.

If people are paying to access your API (Twilio, AWS, Sendgrid, Stripe, for example), then you probably should write helper libraries. A more accessible API translates directly into more revenue for your company.

If you're two founders in a garage somewhere, maybe not. The gap between your company's success and failure is probably not a somewhat easier API interface. Writing a helper library is a lot of work, maybe one to four man-weeks depending on the size of your API and your familiarity with the language in question, plus ongoing maintenance.

You might not need a client library if your customers are all highly experienced programmers. For example the other day I wrote my own client for the Recaptcha API. I knew how I wanted to consume it and learning/installing a Recaptcha library would have been unnecessary overhead.

You may also not need a client library if standard libraries have very good HTTP clients. For example, the Requests library dramatically lowers the barrier for writing a client that uses HTTP basic auth. Developers who are familiar with Requests will have an easier time writing http clients. Implementing HTTP basic auth remains a large pain point in other languages.

How should you design your helper libraries?

Realize that if you are writing a helper library, for many of your customers the helper library will be the API. You should put as much care into its design as you do your HTTP API. Here are a few guiding principles.

• If you've designed your API in a RESTful way, your API endpoints should map to objects in your system. Translate these objects in a straightforward way into classes in the helper library, making the obvious transformations - translate numbers from strings in the API representation into integers, and translate date strings such as "2012-11-05" into date objects.

• Your library should be flexible. I will illustrate this with a short story. After much toil and effort, the Twilio SMS team was ready to ship support for Unicode messages. As part of the change, we changed the API's 'Content-Type' header from

application/json

to

application/json; charset=utf-8

We rolled out Unicode SMS and there was much rejoicing; fifteen minutes later, we found out we'd broken three of our helper libraries, and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. It turns out the libraries had hard-coded a check for an application/json content-type, and threw an exception when we changed the Content-Type header.

• Your library should complain loudly if there are errors. Per the point on flexibility above, your HTTP API should validate inputs, not the client library. For example let's say we had the library raise an error if you tried to send an SMS with more than 160 characters in it. If Twilio ever wanted to ship support for concatenated SMS messages, no one who had this library installed would be able to send multi-message texts. Instead, let your HTTP API do the validation and pass through errors in a transparent way.

• Your library use consistent naming schemes. For example, the convention for updating resources should be the same everywhere. Hanging up a call and changing an account's FriendlyName both represent the same concept, updating a resource. You should have methods to update each that look like:

$account->update('FriendlyName', 'blah');
$call->update('Status', 'completed');

It's okay, even good, to have methods that map to readable verbs:

$account->reserveNumber('+14105556789');
$call->hangup();

However, these should always be thin wrappers around the update() methods.

class Call {
    function hangup() {
        return $this->update('Status', 'completed');
    }
}

Having only the readable-verb names is a path that leads to madness. It becomes much tougher to translate from the underlying HTTP request to code, and much trickier to add new methods or optional parameters later.

• Your library should include a user agent with the library name and version number, that you can correlate against your own API logs. Custom HTTP clients rarely (read: never) will add their own user agent, and standard library maintainers don't like default user agents much.

• Your library needs to include installation instructions, preferably written at a beginner level. Users have varying degrees of experience with things you might take for granted, like package managers, and will try to run your code in a variety of different environments (VPS, AWS, on old versions of programming languages, behind a firewall without admin rights, etc). Any steps your library can take to make things easier are good. As an example, the Twilio libraries include the SSL cert necessary for connecting to the Twilio API.

How should you test your library?

The Twilio API has over 20 different endpoints, split into list resources and instance resources, which support the HTTP methods GET, POST, and sometimes DELETE. Let's say there are 50 different combinations of endpoints and HTTP methods in total. Add in implementations for each helper library, and the complexity grows very quickly - if you have 5 helper libraries you're talking about 250 possible methods, all of which could have bugs.

One solution to this is to write a lot of unit tests. The problem is these take a lot of time to write, and at some level you are going to have to mock out the API, or stop short of making the actual API request. Instead we've taken the following approach to testing.

1. Start with a valid HTTP request, and the parameters that go with it.
2. Parse the HTTP request and turn it into a piece of sample code that exercises an aspect of your helper library.
3. Run that code sample, and intercept the HTTP request made by the library.
4. Compare the output with the original HTTP request.

This approach has the advantage of actually checking against the HTTP request that gets made, so you can test things like URL encoding issues. You can reuse the same set of HTTP requests across all of your libraries. The HTTP "integration" tests will also detect actions that should be possible with the API but are not implemented in the client.

You might think it's difficult to do automated code generation, but it actually was not that much work, and it's very easy if you've written your library in a consistent way. Here's a small sample that generates snippets for our Python helper library.

def process_instance_resource(self, resource, sid, method="GET", params=None):
    """ Generate code snippets for an instance resource """
    get_line = '{} = {}.get("{}")'.format(self.instance_name, self.base, sid)

    if method == "GET":
        interesting_line = 'print {}.{}'.format(self.instance_name,
            self.get_interesting_property(resource))
        return "\n".join([get_line, interesting_line])

    elif method == "POST":
        update_line = '{} = {}.update("{}", {})'.format(
            self.instance_name, self.base, sid, self.transform_params(params))
        interesting_line = 'print {}.{}'.format(
            self.instance_name, self.get_interesting_property(resource))
        return "\n".join([update_line, interesting_line])

    elif method == "DELETE":
        return '{}.delete("{}")'.format(self.base, sid)

    else:
        raise ValueError("Method {} not supported".format(method))

Generating code snippets has the added advantage that you can then easily embed these into your customer-facing documentation, as we've done in our documentation.

How do people use helper libraries?

While pretty much every resource gets used in the aggregate, individual accounts tend to only use one or two resources. This suggests that your API is only being referenced from one or two places within a customer's codebase.

How should you document your helper library?

Per the point above, your library is probably being used in only one or two places in a customer's codebase. This suggests your customer is hiring your API to do a specific job. Your documentation hierarchy should be aligned around those jobs. Combined with the integration test/code snippet generator above, and you should have a working code example for every useful action in your API. You will probably also want to have documentation for the public library interface, such as the types and parameters for each method, but the self-service examples will be OK for 85% of your users.

Liked what you read? I am available for hire.