

Ask HN: What are some examples of good APIs? - bbq

With the recent talk on APIs and RESTful interfaces, I am curious to hear the community's experiences with APIs in the wild.  What makes one API good as contrasted with another?  What are the qualities one looks for in an API?
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Aqua_Geek
The first two examples that come to mind of what I would deem "good" APIs are:

* GitHub: <http://developer.github.com>

* Stripe: <https://stripe.com/docs/api>

Both are easy-to-use and very well documented. The examples listed in Stripe's
actually work - they're hooked up to a test account, so you can copy-paste
into your terminal and start interacting with it immediately.

\-- Edit --

To give you an example of a bad API: I'm currently working with a large corp's
API, and it's just awful. It's horrendously slow (10+ second response times);
everything hits a single URL; the HTTP status of the response is always 200;
node names in the response are misspelled and trncated awkwardly; the
documentation is virtually non-existant; some response nodes provide
inaccurate information. The list goes on.

~~~
bbq
That sounds painful.

Stripe's API does look good. I was actually perusing it just now after reading
their webhooks post.

Now it's time to give the GitHub docs a good read. Thanks!

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ifyouwillit
also, any API with a comprehensive developer community like facebook or
twitter is a good place to start looking for inspiration too.

