11–20 of 47 posts
One of the bigger challenges was finding appropriate APIs to use. The idea being that it had to make sense as a realtime datapoint. Current temperature in California is one example.
Part of the solution I tried for the end user was to add a searchable database of APIs, but I never found many that had that kind of realtime datapoint. The majority of use cases for APIs seems to be CRUD apps, authentication, unchanging datasets, or really specific once off data transforms.
I feel like that's a bummer, as I really love the idea of being able to build up a dashboard of random data points about the world that interest me. The number of astronauts currently in space, the temperature somewhere I like to visit, the traffic density on specific roads. All retrievable individually from various apps, but not in one scifi intelligence center style place.
For anyone interested, the site was https://apiblocks.com
However, I'm not sure if this goes far enough. There exist some formats for describing what APIs can do in natural language, though I'm not convinced that they're really that useful [1][2].
[0] http://apisjson.org [1] http://alps.io [2] http://restdesc.org
What about https://schema.org/APIReference ? Doesn't seem to be widely used, but exists.
I'm seeing people using GraphQL[1] more these days, which also solves the problem of API schema discovery because it's one endpoint with built-in introspection[2].
One of our goals is to mine information about APIs, rather than relying on user input (hence the "catalog"). We still have a long way to go, though. In Web API land, many things follow a power-law distribution: for a few well-known APIs, a lot of information can be found (https://apiharmony-open.mybluemix.net/apis/instagram). For many other APIs, information is sparse and hard to mine.
Adding Schema.org (or similar) annotations would help. But it may be as hard to convince providers to do this, as it is to convince them to write OpenAPI specifications (or similar).
I am pretty sure there are a few API marketplaces out there where its easy to see pricing and code all at once, without having to browse around like a mad person, just like amazon has done it for shopping, with reviews, ratings and q&a.
I wonder if the author knows about Swagger specs; They also started the OpenAPI initiative[0]. I now have wrapped a couple of API's in swagger and using swagger-ui to create beautiful interactive api docs for users. Moving forward I'm going to wrap most of our legacy systems around a swagger spec'ed API and discontinue any alternative access to these systems as time goes by. [0]: http://swagger.io/introducing-the-ope…