What makes a great API?
blog.programmableweb.com
blog.programmableweb.com
In other words, what makes a good API MVP that doesn't get launched only to have to deprecate stuff soon after?
I think that'd be a far more substantial contribution to the SaaS web, since there are far more people starting out or with no API at all than there are companies with pressing demands for a thorough service, and those can more easily have someone experienced on board anyways.
Probably the most important thing for a builder of a B2B API like ours to consider is that someone is requiring (read: forcing) another developer to integrate your product. Counterintuitively, you will probably get more push back from tech teams than from the business side. I understand their reasoning, I've been a software architect for many years and often had to figure out how to delicately stretch technical resources to attack what seems like a constant onslaught of new requests. How did we solve this problem? We created a GitHub account, built wrappers around our REST calls for Python, Ruby, Java, PHP and C#. Our whole goals was to create copy and paste code. Technical pushback has gone way down.
Another important lesson that they touch on is simplicity. Don't be creative or try to show how out of the box you can be on picking resource nouns. Accepting product information? Please use apiurl/Products/id. A notable mark of mastery isn't how complicated you can make something, it's how simple you can express it.
I would like to see a detailed comparison of the framework API's(say in django, Tastypie) with 3rd party managed API's. Its a great read to see the pros and cons in this context.
Hanson's "C interfaces and implementations" has a lot of good stuff but some of it doesn't apply to modern APIs. anyone have a good reference that complements Hanson in the web API era?