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.
Shiny. That’s what your API is. Brand new. Developers can: search your catalog, get your reviews, post orders or comments, and everything! Now, you just need someone to hit your API. Where do you look for those developers? Try looking at your own team. The early adopters and drivers of your API will be the developers who work with it every day. By encouraging them to spend time with your public API, you will be able to drive internal innovation.
So you’ve decided to put together an API, an excellent choice which I applaud. While this is an enormous step in the right direction, hopefully you’re aware that the there’s much more to be done–more, in fact, than I could begin to cover here. Instead, I’ve got one thing for you to focus on today. An app directory.
If there is a segment that is ripe for integration it is travel. APIs in the travel segment have been around for a very long time. In fact, some of the earliest APIs are based on Electronic Data Interchange, which dates back to the 1960s. Granted many of these connections are highly complex enterprise only integrations, it is a history that should bode well for modern day integrations, should it not? Despite a long history of interconnectedness, much of the travel space still remains behind closed doors. The major global distribution systems, represented by Sabre, Travelport, and Amadeus all offer powerful APIs of their own, but their commercial requirements tend to be out of the league of most application developers.
In spite of the limitations the travel industry has effectively self imposed, there still exists many opportunities to monetize sites using travel APIs. There are several types of APIs available in the travel space. Most are transactional and some are content driven. Let’s take a look a broad categorization of available travel APIs.
An API can be an extremely powerful tool, allowing you to expand the functionality of your product without having to do the development yourself. To achieve this, however, you need to get developers using your API. If you’re Google, that’s not an issue, but if you’re a young startup, it can present a real challenge.
In a perfect world, API documentation would contain clear, complete instructions on
everything that developers need to know to use your platform. In reality, organizations
have limited time and budget to create API documentation, and so organizations need
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.
We here at ProgrammableWeb see a lot of APIs. Many of them are pretty secure, and some sadly are not. So, what makes an API secure? Well, I’m glad you asked. There are a lot of things one can do to improve the security of an API. Below I’ll outline three simple practices that make up a good start for a secure API.
We list over 2600+ APIs in our directory across various categories. As we move into the new year, we are likely to see more the best practices for API providers to meet developer expectation,s while at the same time meet the scale that is expected from the most heavily used of APIs. Recently tips from the founder of the Lokad API, a sales forecasting service, summarized some of her tips for API design.
We have seen an explosion in the number of APIs that are now available to developers. It seems like almost everyone has one and those that don’t are scrambling to get one. The focus now is clearly not on just having an API, but having a “great API.” Two excellent presentations from Cloudstock, held earlier this month, give you an overview on the current state of the API market and tips on what makes a great API.
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