Hmmm... Anything enteprisey. I once had to interop with Viacess-Orca RiGHTv IPTV/DRM clusterfuck, and wouldn't recommend anyone to get remotely close. Not just to that, but to anything SOAP. Then, maybe, PayPal's NVP APIs. Quite a mess (although, I guess, I can understand why it's that way), with docs not really covering the fine details, esp. all the possible failures.
Ask HN: What's the worst API you've run into?
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Re: Ask HN: What's the worst API you've run into?
#12Hmmm... Anything enteprisey. I once had to interop with Viacess-Orca RiGHTv IPTV/DRM clusterfuck, and wouldn't recommend anyone to get remotely close. Not just to that, but to anything SOAP. Then, maybe, PayPal's NVP APIs. Quite a mess (although, I guess, I can understand why it's that way), with docs not really covering the fine details, esp. all the possible failures.
a what?
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst API you've run into?
#13Re: Ask HN: What's the worst API you've run into?
#14Not exactly the best way to control a network device. But it is what we have.
Plus, every machine tries to do something different with the non-standard stuff. And different parts of the APIs (called MIBs) from the same vendor follow different reference conventions, so you end up asking a lot of (mostly useless) data to be able to change something from up to down.
Avoid it if you can and use something simpler, like sshing to the device.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst API you've run into?
#15Re: Ask HN: What's the worst API you've run into?
#16Didn't know it could take so much code for polling simple data for IDs.
Re: Ask HN: What's the worst API you've run into?
#17Re: Ask HN: What's the worst API you've run into?
#18Re: Ask HN: What's the worst API you've run into?
#19Re: Ask HN: What's the worst API you've run into?
#20PerfectScript from WordPerfect 5
... because you're talking about that Wordperfect 5.0 with blue screen on a text terminal, right?
I knew you could do some mail merge stuff, but nothing more.
Thanks!