On these integrations and maintenance now versus last
year (i.e. how much more time are you spending this
year on these integrations as compared to last year):
(The answer selection is a percentage scale.)
And how much of it is integrating an API vs. doing it yourself. (eg. You might be spending twice as much time integrating APIs and half as much time doing it yourself)
Also, does external mean a webservice or a module you didn't write yourself. (eg. Facebook vs. Win32)
These are definitely important questions that the poll didn't take into account, that we'll most likely need to address in the near future.
As for external services, we were really looking for anything you did to bring in external data, which could be anything from writing the connectors yourself to just loading a module and passing through some API keys.
so instead of { image: "http://foo.com/image.jpg } you have to catch the Location header and write it into your object.
Next up would be how to represent a date in JSON which seems to vary between an time_t cast to an "int" and a string in ISO-8601 format.
Lets not even get started on XML and attributes vs. elements.
Honestly, in all the work we've been doing (and the work our friends have been doing), it appeared obvious to us that integration was consistently getting worse and we were curious how much worse.
It is now abundantly clear that we were completely off base here. Guess we'll have to run another survey soon with much better answer choices given what we've already learned in less than a day.
Thanks for the feedback and taking the survey!