APIs Are Forever, Wait No...They Can Go Away at Any Time
apievangelist.com
APIs Are Forever, Wait No...They Can Go Away at Any Time
1–10 of 18 posts
Re: APIs Are Forever, Wait No...They Can Go Away at Any Time
#2Clear deprecation policies are great, but I also think that every public API needs to be explicitly versioned. This is commonly achieved by including the version in the URL (api.example.com/v3/whatever), but a suitable header (API-Version: 20120420) would also work.
Once published, a specific version of an API should never change in a backward-incompatible way, only become superseded by newer versions. Likewise, you don't change or deprecate individual methods, you merely stop supporting older versions. That would make it much easier for developers to keep track of API changes.
Re: APIs Are Forever, Wait No...They Can Go Away at Any Time
#3This is one of the best arguments for scraping data, if you can manage it. Generally businesses invest much more time and resources into maintaining an up-to-date, usable website than they would on an API, especially if they don't use a service-oriented architecture internally (ie, consume their own API)
Re: APIs Are Forever, Wait No...They Can Go Away at Any Time
#4as I have tried to start a business building on top of API's, this is in general a risky business. Not only can they disappear, but also work incorrectly, go down, change overnight without notification. Also your access can be shut down just because of a change of heart on their side
If you don't pay for access and have some kind of contract (Twitter firehose, Bing API), yes your business goals are not aligned and you'd better prepare for the worse.
Re: APIs Are Forever, Wait No...They Can Go Away at Any Time
#5This is one of the best arguments for scraping data, if you can manage it. Generally businesses invest much more time and resources into maintaining an up-to-date, usable website than they would on an API, especially if they don't use a service-oriented architecture internally (ie, consume their own API)
What type of business can afford being down every time the site they're scrapping is tweaked?
Re: APIs Are Forever, Wait No...They Can Go Away at Any Time
#6This is one of the best arguments for scraping data, if you can manage it. Generally businesses invest much more time and resources into maintaining an up-to-date, usable website than they would on an API, especially if they don't use a service-oriented architecture internally (ie, consume their own API)
OMG, what?
Scraping data for offline processing, but certainly should not be for user-facing traffic. Cosmetic tweaks can blow up the scraper's parser, UI technologies are built on a taller stack and are prone to higher latencies and points of failure, yada yada.
Re: APIs Are Forever, Wait No...They Can Go Away at Any Time
#7as I have tried to start a business building on top of API's, this is in general a risky business. Not only can they disappear, but also work incorrectly, go down, change overnight without notification. Also your access can be shut down just because of a change of heart on their side If you don't pay for access and have some kind of contract (Twitter firehose, Bing API), yes your business goals are not aligned and yo…
Did you design your software or business plan with an API contingency plan? Some web APIs have reasonable replacements, but most offer some unique value.
Re: APIs Are Forever, Wait No...They Can Go Away at Any Time
#8Programmable Web noticed this last year when Google started charging more for their older APIs. Why kill the API when you can make as much money as you want from its users?
> Google is also providing developers a reason to finally move their maps off of Google Maps V2. Overages for the old version of Google Maps costs $10 per 1,000 map views.
http://blog.programmableweb.com/2011/10/27/google-maps-usage...
Re: APIs Are Forever, Wait No...They Can Go Away at Any Time
#9This is one of the best arguments for scraping data, if you can manage it. Generally businesses invest much more time and resources into maintaining an up-to-date, usable website than they would on an API, especially if they don't use a service-oriented architecture internally (ie, consume their own API)
What type of business can afford being down every time the site they're scrapping is tweaked?
1. Any business that scrapes many sites.
2. Who says it goes down? Might just have stale or incorrect data before the tweak is patched.
Re: APIs Are Forever, Wait No...They Can Go Away at Any Time
#10This is one of the best arguments for scraping data, if you can manage it. Generally businesses invest much more time and resources into maintaining an up-to-date, usable website than they would on an API, especially if they don't use a service-oriented architecture internally (ie, consume their own API)
An example comes to mind:
The Yelp API doesn't expose a given user's public bookmarks, reviews, etc., but they can be easily scraped from the user-facing website.