if only this weren't yet another PR piece for YC startups!
The API-ization of everything
51–60 of 77 posts
Re: The API-ization of everything
#52I wonder, where is the api-zation of CS research ? It would have been nice if CS research was available as source code, but until that happens(probably long into the future),why aren't we seeing more research offered as API , even for fee ?
And is it something tat can be solved by tools ?
Re: The API-ization of everything
#53If only this were more true. API's for most things are...lacking. A dearth of API's is particularly bad in computer security. Vendors: We have this great new device to monitor ___ and alert on it! Customers: We'd like to integrate that with our other devices, and this Hadoop cluster... Vendors: We integrate with all kinds of stuff! Customers: Can you show me? Vendors: You just go to our shitty web front end and click…
> By the way, when you write software, write the API first, then write your cool UI using the API.
This sentence is enough for the upvote. I agree with the rest, too.
Re: The API-ization of everything
#54Reminds me of Rich Hickey arguing for programmatic interfaces first then human interfaces.
Re: The API-ization of everything
#55The final sentence in the article really struck a chord with me... > Where there is paper to push, a call to answer, or a purchase to approve, there is an API coming to replace it. I've made a pretty decent living in life by following the old mantra that anywhere you see an Excel spreadsheet being used in a business process, there's an opportunity to exploit. That idiom has now moved even further, at this point, and…
This is a very interesting idea - a formalized representation of contact information would help a lot in fighting the walled-garden effect of Facebook/etc. Unfortunately, as currently implemented, this seems to be yet another centralized service that that is a single point of failure. Would you consider taking a moment to write up a (draft) protocol first? Core features of the internet (representation of personal met…
Formalised representation of contact information? What, like vcard? There's even an XML flavour of it: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/03/31/qa.html
Re: The API-ization of everything
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, but saving money is also appreciated by those who actually make the purchasing decisions :)
Surprisingly often that isn't actually the case. There are a lot of reasons for this - both positive & negative. In some places the size of your budget is a measure of your importance. In some places once you go over a manager's personal sign off authority there is no difference between asking for $50,000 and $250,000.
Indeed. This is why there's not so many profitable software products between the few hundred $ range and the tens-of-thousands; as soon as you need signoff the cost-of-sale increases enormously.
Re: The API-ization of everything
#57If only this were more true. API's for most things are...lacking. A dearth of API's is particularly bad in computer security. Vendors: We have this great new device to monitor ___ and alert on it! Customers: We'd like to integrate that with our other devices, and this Hadoop cluster... Vendors: We integrate with all kinds of stuff! Customers: Can you show me? Vendors: You just go to our shitty web front end and click…
Honestly it's not more difficult at first -- I've started doing API-first development, eschewing MVC, and it's made life easier. I highly suggest people give it a try!
How is "API-first development" mutually exclusive with MVC?
Re: The API-ization of everything
#58Along these lines, I've been thinking of a building a business around building APIs for small businesses. I'm thinking of local mom and pop grocery stores, local restaurants, my dry cleaner, my car wash guy, etc. Imagine a world where all businesses offered an API to interact with them.
What would an API for a mom and pop grocery store do and who would use it?
Re: The API-ization of everything
#59I wonder, where is the api-zation of CS research ? It would have been nice if CS research was available as source code, but until that happens(probably long into the future),why aren't we seeing more research offered as API , even for fee ? And is it something tat can be solved by tools ?
A lot of CS research really does not lend itself well to being implemented as a web-based service. A new disk scheduling policy would have all of its performance advantage blown away by network latency. A new load speculation technique would be an even worse for that format. A new static analysis is likely to be far too compute-intensive to be offered to the public on hardware the research group has the time/money to operate. It would also have to be reimplemented for whatever languages the users care about analyzing, which research funding agencies would not be thrilled about paying for (it's not research). A new complexity proof probably doesn't even have exportable functionality.
Could you point to some particular work that you would like to see APIzed?
Re: The API-ization of everything
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly it's not more difficult at first -- I've started doing API-first development, eschewing MVC, and it's made life easier. I highly suggest people give it a try!
How is "API-first development" mutually exclusive with MVC?
I think he's conflating "MVC" with "server-side template generation"