Neal Chaudhary, PhD

This project showcases a web API that can coalesce numbers from many upstream APIs to summarize health insurance plan information. This API gains both flexibility and reliability through software design. Specifically, dependency inversion is the software design principle of separating higher-level business logic from lower-level implementation details. Here the process of querying upstream APIs is separated from the higher-level logic of coalescing plan data.

For example, the API can flexibly switch between the requests or urllib libraries through provided adaptors; still, other libraries or methods could also be added by simply creating a new adaptor that implements the required interface, so the API can easily be updated or customized to use new or different APIs without requiring changes to the higher-level business logic.

Furthermore, this separation of concerns also enables the testing framework to provide simulated results without modification, allowing for easier testing and more robust code. In a production environment, the adapter choice could be defaulted or wrapped with a particular preference for end-users, providing even more flexibility and adaptability to the API.