July 8, 2007
Creating a RESTful API Detailed Case Study
Joe Gregorio posted a great example of designing a RESTful API, and the brief ensuing discussion is instructive, too. (Yes, it’s a few weeks old.)
He walks through the steps of extracting the nouns, mapping the verbs, ensuring correctness and reliability, and generating and validating tickets to provide a RESTful API for a moderately complex situation.
It looks like development tools are finally catching up, such that it’s much easier to rely on HTTP verbs and response codes than it was even a year ago. From my limited experience, though, it seems there are still some gaps, and thus obstacles. If you have experience in this area, drop me a line.
February 4, 2007
Community-Oriented Search API Trends
Ever get curious about the trends in the APIs provided by web search engines and social sites with a public search? Well, I did, couldn’t find a convenient reference, spent a morning doing some research, and am sharing my data here.
I’ve only included mainstream communities with public search APIs that do not require user-level authentication. That is, it’s possible to get “whole web” or “whole site” results that match keywords/tags, and not just get back a user’s own posts/photos/etc. (which excludes del.icio.us, simpy, bloglines, tailrank, facebook, among others).
Highlights for the ADD crowd: Nearly everybody requires an API key. Most rate limit. Almost nobody supports OpenSearch. REST APIs are overwhelmingly preferred. Yahoo! (+ Flickr) wins the “easiest to work with” award (no surprise).
Read on for comparisons of eight players, presented in alphabetical order. Then, add comments with corrections or APIs that I missed.
Better Software. Better Science. Better Sense. 