
What makes a great API? - Revisor
http://blog.programmableweb.com/2012/07/19/what-makes-a-great-api-the-five-keys/
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goldfeld
The guide seems to approach API design from the perspective of big players. It
would have been nice to point out what to focus on first for fledgling
services that want to take baby steps with the right foot. Rate limiting and
metrics are way less important when you're happy someone is even using your
API in the first place.

In other words, what makes a good API MVP that doesn't get launched only to
have to deprecate stuff soon after?

I think that'd be a far more substantial contribution to the SaaS web, since
there are far more people starting out or with no API at all than there are
companies with pressing demands for a thorough service, and those can more
easily have someone experienced on board anyways.

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ljd
If it helps, I can share a bit about that. Our API has gone from several
hundred hits to several million, while its no Twitter API we are closing out
our "0 - 1" phase as Peter Thiel would put it.

Probably the most important thing for a builder of a B2B API like ours to
consider is that someone is requiring (read: forcing) another developer to
integrate your product. Counterintuitively, you will probably get more push
back from tech teams than from the business side. I understand their
reasoning, I've been a software architect for many years and often had to
figure out how to delicately stretch technical resources to attack what seems
like a constant onslaught of new requests. How did we solve this problem? We
created a GitHub account, built wrappers around our REST calls for Python,
Ruby, Java, PHP and C#. Our whole goals was to create copy and paste code.
Technical pushback has gone way down.

Another important lesson that they touch on is simplicity. Don't be creative
or try to show how out of the box you can be on picking resource nouns.
Accepting product information? Please use apiurl/Products/id. A notable mark
of mastery isn't how complicated you can make something, it's how simple you
can express it.

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pajju
Are Enterprises so lazy to build an API around their data models?

I would like to see a detailed comparison of the framework API's(say in
django, Tastypie) with 3rd party managed API's. Its a great read to see the
pros and cons in this context.

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mehdim
Nice slidedeck for good APIs principles evangelisation But nothing on Policy
and Terms of Use which become the main issue for developers , before good
design.

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jnazario
surprisingly little mention of the actual interfaces themselves (the API
calls) and instead a lot of focus on the meat that goes on those bones.

Hanson's "C interfaces and implementations" has a lot of good stuff but some
of it doesn't apply to modern APIs. anyone have a good reference that
complements Hanson in the web API era?

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orionblastar
A great API is one that is fully documented and doesn't hide any API calls.
One that doesn't keep changing the API calls to make sure older programs
break, but create newer API calls to do new things and keep the old ones for
legacy support.

