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Developer Week in Review: Are APIs intellectual property?
Returning after a brief hiatus due to my annual spring head cold, welcome back to your weekly dose of all things programming. Last week, I was attending the Genomes, Environments and Traits conference (I'm a participant in the Personal Genome Project ), when I got notified that WWDC registration had opened up. I ended up having to type in my credit card information on my iPhone while listening to the project organizers discuss what they were doing with the saliva I had sent them.
API Terms and Conditions Done Right
This guest post comes from Steven Willmott. Steven is the CEO of 3scale networks, a company that provides infrastructure services for a wide variety of APIs. One of the questions we are often asked at 3scale (a ProgrammableWeb sponsor) is around legal terms and conditions (T&Cs) – once we have all the technical stuff, what should we put in the API terms and conditions? Should they be different from our web site terms and conditions? What will the impact of certain clauses be? Since we’re not a law firm, we generally can’t answer this question in detail but there are a few recurring themes we often see in T&Cs that seem worth sharing.
Versioning your APIs : Freelancing Gods
As I developed Flying Sphinx , I found myself both writing and consuming several APIs: from Heroku to Flying Sphinx, Flying Sphinx to Heroku, the flying-sphinx gem in apps to Flying Sphinx, Flying Sphinx to Sphinx servers, and Sphinx servers to Flying Sphinx. None of that was particularly painful – but when Josh Kalderimis was improving the flying-sphinx gem, he noted that the API it interacts with wasn’t that great. Namely, it was inconsistent with what it returned (sometimes text status messages, sometimes JSON ), it was sending authentication credentials as GET / POST parameters instead of in a header, and it wasn’t versioned. I was thinking that given I control pretty much every aspect of the service, it didn’t matter if the APIs had versions or not. However, as Josh and I worked through improvements, it became clear that the apps using older versions of the flying-sphinx gem were going to have one expectation, and newer versions another.
JSON, without opening and closing tags, is lighter weight, which both developers and providers appreciate. There also isn’t the overhead of namespaces and schemas The trend in our API directory is quite apparent: XML is on the decline. But is that a good thing? Enterprises may prefer XML because they have the tools in place to support it. Also, much of the reason XML is complex is that it’s trying to solve complex problems of data interchange by providing a meta language to describe the data.
1 in 5 APIs Say “Bye XML”
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