

APIs are Eating Up Software - harryzhang
https://www.lob.com/blog/apis-eat-software

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randomdrake
One thing that's been nice about the popularity trend concerning APIs, is that
it's made is so much easier for programmers to prevent NIH syndrome. Things
used to be a lot more difficult so developing large things in-house _seemed_
more defensible. And we suffered for it...

Not too many years ago, it was _much_ more difficult to find quality, pre-
built software. Github did not exist. _Some_ APIs were available, but they
were generally complicated or miles of WSDL files to get anything done.
Implementing one of them was difficult! You could head to the search engines
and rummage through all sorts of libraries, package managers, paid sites,
SourceForge, and so on. Finding packages that were not only up to date, but
functional, _and_ able to run on your OS and version, was more of a chore than
it is now.

These days, anyone who is paying attention to trends in startups or software
would scoff at the thought of having to implement complicated server-side
software for payment gateways.

And why shouldn't they? There are _excellent_ services available that do not
require knowledge of software to implement! If you can craft an HTTP request
in your language of choice, you're off to the races! Database design? Storage?
Encryption? OOP? MVC? TDD? Who cares? Since you _don 't have to write or
install software_ you are up and operational with builtin scalability and
functionality in: possibly minutes.

Awesome.

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norswap
Is it a good thing though? APIs are centralized and brittle. Sometimes an API
makes sense, sometimes I'd rather buy a program or library that I'm sure won't
change or go away.

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brianobush
I think the API trend now is here to stay in a large part, but there will
always be a place for a complete embedded solution. One embarrassing outage
and customers would loose faith in a solution.

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kyleshockey
This is true of the startup universe, but businesses at large will- for the
foreseeable future- want software that just works. In the rest of the world,
businesses that don't want to be technical are developing their own solutions
because the solutions they're using now suck.

~~~
buckbova
In my line of work, biotech, API's are ideal for communication or some for
exposed web services we can hammer into an API. Often times we are left to
pass flat files around or have no hope of bidirectional communication between
systems.

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dreamfactory
I do love the idea of an API-centred Lego-ish software assembly approach, but
imagining a future when my entire app solely consists of calls to API's (maybe
100's of them), I worry a bit about wait times due to serial blocking calls
(and failover generally), and dependency management at a business level (how
do I track when one of them goes out of business or is having some downtime).
I guess there will have to be a big industry out of wrapping and managing
lower level API's in higher level abstractions (just as we see infrastructure
businesses built on Amazon).

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shravvmehtaa
Exactly, API are definitely the future. Many companies want to integrate
products into their own software or solutions. API are easily allowing people
to do that. Lob.com sounds awesome, and the prices are really good!

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TamDenholm
Id love to use lob but theyre not operating in the uk. Does anyone know of a
similar service for uk?

