3 Tips for Building a Web App That Can Scale. Lew Cirne is founder and CEO of New Relic, the leading SaaS-based web application performance management company supporting 10,000 customers including companies from Comcast to Zynga. Twitter generates about eight terabytes of data a day. That’s a hell of a lot of data for one application. Some SaaS companies might look at that number and think that they’ll never need to handle that much data, or if they did, it would take far more infrastructure and server hardware than they could afford to maintain. In both cases, they might be wrong. Any SaaS business can handle as much data as Twitter and many can do it on only a handful of servers. It’s all a matter of understanding your data and planning your technology investments to be as scalable as possible.
Sounds easy enough. 1. It may sound like premature optimization, but planning to scale is really just basic business strategy. 2. The key is to pay close attention to how users are actually accessing the data. 3. 40 Education APIs for Startup Weekend Seattle EDU. There have been hundreds of Startup Weekends around the world in 2011 alone. By the end of the year, Seattle will have hosted several, including the Startup Weekend Seattle EDU which starts this weekend. The 54 hour event brings together software developers, graphic designers and business people to build education focused applications. What better way to give these new startups a leg up than to encourage them to build on top of one or more of the 40 education APIs in the directory? To pepare for the event I wanted to put together a short list of education related APIs: There are 40 education APIs in the directory, these are just a handful of them.
Startup Weekend Seattle EDU starts 5:00 PM on Friday 9/30 with a registration dinner and networking, and concludes Sunday 10/2 with judging, awards and a wrap-up ceremony, at PACCAR Hall on the University of Washington campus. Both comments and pings are currently closed. The Little Manual of API Design - Powered by Google Docs. The Rise Of The API, The Future Of The Web. Last month, Twitter and Facebook made some moves to hide RSS feeds and put focus more on their APIs.
There was the typical ranting that followed the news, some in favor of RSS and others not. Now that the conversation and controversy of RSS being killed again has died down, I wanted to address the real question behind Twitter’s and Facebook’s decisions. As I have said before, RSS is not dead, it is infrastructure. RSS had hoped to be adopted by the mass consumer, but the tools did not provide a truly user friendly way to consume it.
That being said, a lot of tools are completely dependent upon RSS. Any news reader that aggregates information from various sites uses RSS in the background. The real issue at hand is the evolution of the web. If you focus on a single web application, you would never find a reason to really move away from JavaScript and JSON. 73% of the APis on Programmable Web use REST. Some of the data format questions can be answered by other means as well. The Pursuit of APIness. Where do good ideas come from? Other people, mostly. Morse, Bell, Farnsworth, Ford and Gates – none of them invented anything completely from scratch. They all innovated upon existing ideas, then refined them and took them to market at just the right time, in just the right way.
The web, too, is an iterative innovation: a massive, layered, collaborative platform built upon open-source code, hacks, memes and mashups. It belongs to no single, great brain. And, thanks partly to the prolific publishing of APIs (application programming interfaces), it never will. APIs let third-party developers tap into the functionality of an existing web service, and so give everyone the ability to build upon the web’s good ideas.
In a sense, APIs can be seen as a springboard for innovation, as opposed to invention. The truth is, there can be infinite new uses of any given API. Marketers are realizing they don’t need to reinvent the software wheel. Good APIs also provide valuable data and analytics. Getting Started With The PayPal API - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement PayPal is the most popular platform for receiving online payments today. The ease of opening a PayPal account and receiving payments compared to opening a merchant account with a traditional payment gateway is probably the number one reason for its popularity, with a close second being the comprehensive API that PayPal provides for its payment services. In this post, I will break down some of the techniques and approaches to working with the PayPal API, in order to make integration and troubleshooting simpler and easier.
Disclaimer: PayPal’s API is among the worst I’ve ever had to deal with. Inconsistencies, sometimes poor or conflicting documentation, unpredictable failures and account changes, and major differences between the live and sandbox versions all conspire to make the PayPal API quite a pain in the arse to work with. The Different Payment Options PayPal offers a variety of payment options, which might be confusing at first: Making API Requests Express Checkout 1. 2.