APIs are inherently difficult to learn for developers. The ProgrammableWeb API is no exception to this rule either. In this article we will show some examples of how Yahoo’s YQL can be used make developer’s life a bit easier when using the ProgrammableWeb API.
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. The content of this post should not be taken as legal advice in any way, but hopefully it provides some useful things to consider.
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. The secret to unlocking the full potential of your APIs is to create documentation that makes it easy for partners to use them.
At the recent Small Business Web Summit, several member-company representatives hashed out a list of guidelines that may one day become a “Good Housekeeping”-esque seal for The Small Business Web, a consortium of API providers that are working together to create better small business tools. Among the list is an entire section devoted to APIs, where the seal would signify a series of promises to partners.
Greetings Programs! Well-designed REST APIs can be leveraged to create balanced client-server web applications; where the client’s responsibilities extend far beyond simply rendering a server-generated HTML document. Web sites and applications have been slowly shifting to this architecture since Internet Explorer 5’s inclusion of the core AJAX mechanics, DOM scripting and XHR. More recently, the architectural shift has been accelerated by significant advances in standards (e.g. HTML5) and performance (e.g. device CPUs and JavaScript).
JSON is popular, at least when it comes to API data formats. Of the new APIs we added to our directory, one in five supports only JSON. But how many support JSONP, which allows developers to load data directly on the client side no matter the originating server? There are 258 JSONP APIs out of a possible 1,724 JSON APIs. That’s only 15% that support an approach many developers will want to use.
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. The mobile device and app revolution hadn’t yet begun. Terms like “social networking” and “wisdom of crowds” were going “viral”. Web services and APIs were still emerging. The Google IPO of late 2004 had effectively slammed shut the Web 1.0 dotbomb era, paving the way for the amazing evolution of Web 2.0 services in 2005 that hit the mainstream in 2006.
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. The goal of your documentation is to explain the API in a way that works for all of those types of developers, and all types of learners. The most friendly APIs provide all six of the ways described below to engage with their documentation.
Developers are game changers. Developers are craftspeople. Like all smart, motivated tinkerers who like to make stuff, developers also tend to have strongly-held opinions about what makes their craft easier or more difficult. Developer pain tiers upwards from mildly annoying to “bang head here” WTF. Debugging someone else’s sloppy code or terminal sessions timing out? Non-awesome. Coworkers talking loudly on the phone near their desk or standing over their shoulders? Painful. Awful documentation? Excruciating.
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.
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