With respect to Web APIs, the industry has clearly and emphatically landed on REST as the standard way to implement these services. And for good reason… REST, which is generally implemented as a one-size-fits-all solution, is an excellent choice for a most companies who wish to expose their content to third parties, mobile app developers, partners, internal teams, etc. There are many tomes about what REST is and how best to implement it, so I won’t go into detail here. But if I were to sum up the value proposition to these companies of the traditional REST solution, I would describe it as:
Advocates of platform-as-a-Service offerings promote how easy it is to deploy and manage applications without having to be – or to hire – a system administrator. But as with most things, there are inevitable trade-offs. The less you have to manage the platform you deploy to, the more you’re tied to the stack the PaaS provides. Today AppFog adds a duo of supported services to their stack, bringing new database and email options to the company’s developers.
It wasn’t that long ago, just late last year, that I started wondering if CloudMine was trying to replace me. Just a few months pass, and it seems my fears were not unfounded.
If you’re not familiar with what the CloudMine API offers, it’s backend-as-a-service, with the core feature being easy storage and access of user – and global – data. All that’s required to store JSON data in the global scope is an HTTP call with the application’s credentials. Storing user data in a private scope only requires the addition of the user’s credentials.
Or should that headline have been A/B Testing Comes to Google App Engine API? Google’s PaaS has quietly been rolling out a release every month. In its second release of the year, the App Engine team has focussed not just on its usual fixes, but a series of changes for the Administration Console and a platform features that are bound to make other PaaS vendors sit up and take note: support for A/B Testing of your web application.
I recently had my second conversation with Josh Williams, CSO of Kontagent, a leader in the world of big data. In our previous conversation we touched on the potential for PhD level mathematics students to apply their knowledge to the challenges in the big data space. By the end of this second conversation it became apparent to me that there is a huge opportunity to be seized by companies that can leverage big data systems.
There are now a number of backend-as-a-service companies focused on mobile developers. We list 6 backend APIs that help with common mobile tasks, including the Cocoafish API, which was today acquired by Appcelerator. But it’s a much bigger ecosystem, as shown in the infographic below.
Amazon just dropped prices on its popular Amazon S3 API, which provides storage to much of the web. The service will pass 1 trillion objects stored this year. With that volume comes opportunities to lower the costs, as we’ve seen from other companies whose entire product line includes APIs.
Google App Engine has had a tough year last year. It had to deal with developer revolt when it announced it’s pricing and has also seen its mindshare in the PaaS landscape reduce with the emergence of polyglot platforms like CloudFoundry and Heroku. One thing they have got consistently going for them and which is continuing this year is their razor sharp focus on releases. Google App Engine has been averaging a release every month of late and January saw them release the latest version 1.6.2.
So you need to send emails. Pretty simple right? Not so fast. It doesn’t matter how easy your language or framework makes sending emails, if you try to do it on your own be prepared to configure mail servers, setup Spam-related DNS entries, and still wonder if mail is actually being delivered. And your applications needs to process incoming email? Back to the config files, piping mail to your script – or just end up polling a POP or IMAP box. That’s what I had to do, back in the day. Fortunately, like so many things today, there’s an API for that. Actually there are a few.
There’s a difference between knowing and hoping your API can handle any traffic you send to it. The premise behind the new performance testing service Cloud Assault is that testing scale should be part of development. The service has the Cloud Assault API to enable coders to do just that.
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