

Ask HN: Anyone building a REST API only product? - djworth

I have been thinking about building an REST API only product.  I don't have anything specific in mind but I would prefer to build something without a UI.  I end up spending hours even days sometimes on tweaking html and CSS.  Not fun...<p>Thoughts?  Is anyone else building an API only product?  How is it going?
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cperciva
Tarsnap (<http://www.tarsnap.com/>) doesn't use a REST API (for various
reasons, I built my own API), but it's essentially an API-only product. Users
will (once I get the website built) be able to create accounts and check how
much storage and bandwidth they're using via the website; but all the "core"
work is computers talking to computers.

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djworth
I thought there was a client app that did most of the data management? So, if
I had I desktop application and was a user of tarsnap could I bake backups
into my app?

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cperciva
_I thought there was a client app that did most of the data management?_

Well, yes. But it's a command-line application, and all of the communication
with my server is via a client-server API, not via a web browser -- maybe this
isn't quite what you meant in your original question, but it certainly fits on
the "without a UI" side of things.

 _if I had I desktop application and was a user of tarsnap could I bake
backups into my app?_

It would be difficult to bake tarsnap backups into your application directly,
but tarsnap's command-line interface is almost exactly the same as tar's --
and I suspect that tar is one of the top 10 most commonly scripted UNIX
programs. So if it would be very easy for your application to run tarsnap as a
subprocess.

