Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeffbarr | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this what web services were promising us? Cool library, but ideally the SaaS apps would export APIs for this functionality.

View on HN

The lowest common denominator of SaaS APIs is HTTP. Apart from that, everyone does it different.

Some use JSON, some use XML, some use SOAP... Sometimes you authenticate with Basic authentication, sometimes you use OAuth 1.0 and need to sign each request, sometimes it's OAuth 2.0 and you just need the token. Oh, and the actual GET parameter for the token is different, too...

There are APIs where you need to set a 'X-API-Version' header to something, or you'll get weird results. The list goes on...

The goal here is to hide all that crap from developers and focus on achieving the desired result.

Instead of hiding it, why don't we ditch it altogether? HTTP is simpler, more direct and easier to debug. By sticking to HTTP, we might get closer to a situation where "everyone does it the same". Life might be easier.

Nah, it would never work. Pay no mind. I'm just a fool.

You're not a fool, just a dreamer.

All of the things in that post use HTTP. (Though SOAP doesn't require HTTP). Did you mean REST? Even then, people often don't get it right, and it's still not as nice a language specific API. (er, application specific api)

This is using the services' APIs, but standardizing as much as possible the Python code required to use them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com