Your API Sucks: Why Developers Hang Up and How to Stop That

#1

Post by abraham » Thu, Jan 20, 2011, 10:15 PM UTC

Your API Sucks: Why Developers Hang Up and How to Stop That
blog.apigee.com

Re: Your API Sucks: Why Developers Hang Up and How to Stop That

#2

Post by orangecat » Thu, Jan 20, 2011, 10:24 PM UTC

My top rule for APIs is that simple things should be simple. If I want a minimal HTTP listener, don't make me create and intricately combine a dozen ConnectionReuseStrategy and ContentProducer and HTTPEntityEnclosingRequest objects. Apache HTTPComponents, I'm looking at you.

Re: Your API Sucks: Why Developers Hang Up and How to Stop That

#3

Post by jamesaguilar » Thu, Jan 20, 2011, 11:38 PM UTC

"Sucks" articles suck. Stop writing them.

Re: Your API Sucks: Why Developers Hang Up and How to Stop That

#4

Post by gsteph22 » Thu, Jan 20, 2011, 11:56 PM UTC

But if something really sucks, then we must call it out as such!

Also...hahahaha HTTPEntityEnclosingRequest

Re: Your API Sucks: Why Developers Hang Up and How to Stop That

#5

Post by Groxx » Fri, Jan 21, 2011, 12:55 AM UTC

No comments on the page nor Youtube (not that I go to youtube for valuable comments...), no summary, and no captions.

Maybe I'll look at it later. Videos are an extremely slow way to absorb information, especially presentation-style videos where people speak slowly and clearly and try to explain everything so everyone will understand it.

Re: Your API Sucks: Why Developers Hang Up and How to Stop That

#6

Post by earth2marsh » Fri, Jan 21, 2011, 1:13 AM UTC

Groxx wrote: post #5

No comments on the page nor Youtube (not that I go to youtube for valuable comments...), no summary, and no captions. Maybe I'll look at it later. Videos are an extremely slow way to absorb information, especially presentation-style videos where people speak slowly and clearly and try to explain everything so everyone will understand it.

The Apigee blog uses Disqus, so you should be able to comment: http://blog.apigee.com/detail/api_design_for_developers/

Always interested in feedback, either on giving better talks or on making better APIs / developer experiences.

Re: Your API Sucks: Why Developers Hang Up and How to Stop That

#7

Post by julian37 » Fri, Jan 21, 2011, 2:52 AM UTC

Joshua Bloch gave a talk in 2006 that was about "real" API design, not REST API design, and is mainly concerned with much-loathed Java, but despite all this I think it's still very relevant and well worth watching. It's about an hour long.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/effective-api-design

Re: Your API Sucks: Why Developers Hang Up and How to Stop That

#8

Post by Groxx » Fri, Jan 21, 2011, 4:01 AM UTC

orangecat wrote: post #2

My top rule for APIs is that simple things should be simple. If I want a minimal HTTP listener, don't make me create and intricately combine a dozen ConnectionReuseStrategy and ContentProducer and HTTPEntityEnclosingRequest objects. Apache HTTPComponents, I'm looking at you.

I tend to achieve that by making a few layers of access. I try really hard to make every chunk of re-usable code I write work with as few arguments as possible in the most common uses. Usually, this means one or two at most.

There are cases where HTTPEntityEnclosingRequest objects could be useful to be able to declare... but most of the time you just want port.listen(delegate). I boggle at how few systems have easy-use methods along those lines, and how so many things return 'void' instead of 'this'.