
Ask HN: Which web API's would you like to be easier to use? - awwx
Which web API's would you like to be easier to use?  What do you find painful about them?<p>I've noticed some common patterns in the things that I wish were already implemented for me when I've worked with web API's, so I'm thinking it might be useful to get these into a library or service so everyone wouldn't need to reimplement them every time.<p>For example, I always want to log every request sent and response received from the API (at least for a day or two), and how long each call took, since a remote API can always do something undocumented or have some transient problem, and I want to be able to figure out what happened.  Not rocket science, but annoying to have to do every time.<p>And the process flow involving API calls often involve multiple steps (for example, we make a call, they return immediately with "ok, request received successfully", but then later they call one of our web hooks with the actual response).  So providing some abstraction around the process could be useful, such as a providing a closure of the data used across the multiple steps and perhaps reifying the concept of a "step" would be useful.<p>Such effort would ideally start with some particular API to ground the implementation in reality: an API that is both painful to use and one that people care about.<p>And, in response to the comments of people who want or are building easier to use interfaces to existing API's, yes, I do want to hear about those.  The part I'm thinking the most about right now wouldn't provide such an interface directly, but it might prove useful to someone who was implementing such an interface.
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DenisM
Amazon S3, I want it to have a WebDav interface instead of the proprietary
stuff they have. That way I can use different tools to save file to S3
directly - less hassle.

To make a bit of money you can take a percentage of the bandwidth charges,
sell your EC2 appliance, or offer both options.

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awwx
Have you tried <http://www.jungledisk.com/> ? It maps S3 to appear as a drive
or directory on your computer, so you can use S3 from any program or tool that
can read and write files.

Or is there something specific about WebDav that you needed?

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DenisM
1\. I don't want to install a tool on each computer. I want to set it up once
and then use it from all of my {servers, macbook, virtual machines}.

2\. I want the links resulting from upload to be directly and (sometimes)
publicly downloadable without going through jungledisk. E.g. I use screenshot
app called Skitch which saves screenshots to WebDav among other things. I want
to be able to save screenshot and share it immediately.

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olalonde
I thought payment APIs were especially a pain (that's why I'm working on
<http://payfacade.com>).

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awwx
Yup, I've experienced a lot of frustration myself the couple of times I've
worked with payment API's.

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consultutah
Great question. I've made a little bit of money making Authorize.net's AIM API
easier to use in .NET: <http://sharpauthorize.com>

Now, authorize.net could replace their aim API with an easier to use soap one,
and that might put me out of business - doubt it, because there are lots of
free competitors already and I still do pretty well.

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johns
It's strange that they haven't added a SOAP interface tot he AIM API yet since
they have it for both ARB and CIM. I didn't know about SharpAuthorize. I know
there are a lot of half-baked .NET implementations for Authorize.net (and I've
written a few myself) but I might use this for an upcoming project to save
some time.

