Technologies
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Make Your API More Successful
This guest post comes from Daniel Jacobson , Director of Application Development for NPR . Daniel leads NPR’s content management solutions, is the creator of the NPR API and is a frequent contributor to the Inside NPR.org blog . The purpose of a content API is to make the content available to its audience in the most useful and efficient way possible. To be a useful API, it needs to help the developers make their jobs easier. This could mean a wide range of things, including making it easier to dig into the API, allowing for greater flexibility in the responses, improved performance and efficiency for both the API and its consumer. Below are seven development techniques (all of which are part of the NPR API ) that can help content providers improve the usefulness and efficiency of their APIs on both sides of the track.
This guest post comes from Peter Gruenbaum , founder of SDK Bridge . He has worked as a programmer/writer to describe technologies as diverse as the Tablet PC, mobile phones, and social networking. The number of Web APIs is growing rapidly (there are over 2,000 APIs in the ProgrammableWeb directory), especially with the popularity of Software as a Service. Because Web APIs are still fairly new, the quality and format of their documentation varies a great deal.
API Documentation
To support the demand for better API documentation, Mashery , a provider of API management and strategy services, launched a new set of API documentation tools. The new feature is a combination of API documentation and an API explorer, allowing developers to make requests on an API inline while browsing the API reference materials. Lack of quality documentation is a major stumbling point for developers when looking to integrate with an API, according to Peter Gruenbaum , founder of SDK Bridge :
Smarter Documentation
The Six Pillars of Documentation
This guest post is part of the Developer Support Handbook by Pamela Fox . Previously, Pamela worked as a developer advocate at Google and is now working on her own startup. You can provide the best API in the world, but if you don’t document it, the only developers that will use it are the ones that are paid to do it, or that enjoy pain. Most likely, your goal is to attract every type of developer: the hobbyists, the newbies, the freelancers, the paid employees, the student and more.
This guest post comes from Peter Gruenbaum , founder of SDK Bridge . He has worked as a programmer/writer to describe technologies as diverse as the Tablet PC, mobile phones, and social networking. to prioritize to create documentation that is most useful to the people who will use it. This post looks at the results of a survey of those who rely upon API documentation. Two other important factors that were mentioned by several respondents are (1) it is very helpful to explain why you would use something in addition to how you use it and (2) good overviews can really help when getting started with a technology. Who Responded
API Documentation Survey
API Documentation for the Win
This guest post comes from Erik Schmidt, who works on Application Enablement at Alcatel-Lucent (parent company of ProgrammableWeb). APIs are a business development tool. Whether you are monetizing directly or indirectly, they allow you to create effective partnerships and expand your platform faster and more efficiently than ever before.
Delyn Simons is Director of Developer Relations for Mashery (a ProgrammableWeb sponsor). Delyn previously worked in developer community for eBay and still believes that people are basically good. A long time ago in Internet years, in a galaxy not so far away, a handful of tech titans in Silicon Valley and Seattle began building business platforms and battling for supremacy.
Winners and Losers
REST Mistakes
Web APIs typically use REST style for communication while moving away from more traditional SOAP web services. Our ProgrammableWeb service directory currently lists around 1500 services which are using REST , and around 360 using SOAP . Why is REST becoming so popular and what are the common mistakes in the REST API design? Graphic from Open APIs: a State of the MarketJSON vs XML
Once upon a time there was the great debate over JSON vs XML. The past few years have seen JSONs popularity rise despite XML (and other formats) being well-established . Our own statistics on ProgrammableWeb show a significant increase in the number of JSON APIs over 2009/2010. During 2009 there were only 191 JSON APIs registered.
This guest post comes from Chad R. Smith, founder of The Easy API . He has worked with developers all over the world assisting with architecture and functionality for high availability APIs. Asking the simple question to API maintainers of how scalable is your API seems to conjure some awkward pauses. The Easy API recently discovered how well equipped we were to handle a massive influx of requests to our system. Quickly it became evident that the system wasn’t able to handle over a million requests a month, and failed under heavy load.
Scaling
Push standardization ?
Real-time alerts and notifications are a powerful feature being added to more applications every day; the addition of real-time notifications can make a big difference in user experience and peoples' work performance when using apps. Unfortunately, there's not one standard way to easily code these notifications across platforms and there's very little support for web apps seeking to send notifications to users. It's been one of the advantages that desktop apps have had over the web.API Managment Tool