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The API Hub: Jeff Bezos-Backed Mashape Launches To The Public With 430 APIs

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Re: The API Hub: Jeff Bezos-Backed Mashape Launches To The Public With 430 APIs

#21

Post by fosk »

daveasaurus wrote: post #20
firlefans wrote: post #19

I found Mashape via google as I was looking for a simple way to monetize our API (and get some exposure) about a year ago. We posted our Whois API ( http://www.mashape.com/nametoolkit/name-toolkit ) on Mashape. In the early days it was quiet but I liked the auto-generated clients. It's really been picking up in the last few months and the hassle-free billing, documentation is great. Augusto is great, he is still pers…

Do the auto generated clients only return JSON for each client library? Do you still need to write your own parser to parse the JSON? * Nevermind. Yes they return JSON, I just read the documentation.

The client libraries already parse the returned JSON response. Or you can still consume the API without client libraries and get the raw JSON response.

Re: The API Hub: Jeff Bezos-Backed Mashape Launches To The Public With 430 APIs

#22

Post by blastStu »

Hey there, just adding my two pence here.

I'm Stuart, co-founder of chatterbox.co. We've been using Mashape from the early days when they were back in beta, distributing our Sentiment Analysis API (http://www.mashape.com/chatterbox-co/sentiment-analysis-free). For a startup, getting to market as quickly as possible is great.. what you don't want though is a half baked product. Mashape allowed us to focus on building awesome sentiment analysis, so that we didn't have to bother about billing, rate limiting, etc and all the DB infrastructure that runs behind it. Certainly worth checking out, especially if all your stuff uses JSON anyway (which it should!).

Re: The API Hub: Jeff Bezos-Backed Mashape Launches To The Public With 430 APIs

#23

Post by scottbruin »

firlefans wrote: post #19

I found Mashape via google as I was looking for a simple way to monetize our API (and get some exposure) about a year ago. We posted our Whois API ( http://www.mashape.com/nametoolkit/name-toolkit ) on Mashape. In the early days it was quiet but I liked the auto-generated clients. It's really been picking up in the last few months and the hassle-free billing, documentation is great. Augusto is great, he is still pers…

Not to rain on your parade, but to anyone looking to try this I just wasted 30 minutes getting setup and trying it to find out that Godaddy, for example, returns next to no results through this service so it's no solution to WHOIS woes.

Re: The API Hub: Jeff Bezos-Backed Mashape Launches To The Public With 430 APIs

#25

Post by nl »

scribu wrote: post #15

Standardizing APIs is a Good Thing. Unfortunately, standards alone don't seem to be enough. (oAuth2 anyone?) Therefore, offering a proxy that has enough benefits to developers to make them switch to it's standard seems like a more realistic approach. So, I truly hope Mashape takes off.

Mashape doesn't standardise anything - it "just" provides API billing and management tools.

Saying APIs should be standardized is very naive anyway - APIs often need to offer specific platform-specific features.

Re: The API Hub: Jeff Bezos-Backed Mashape Launches To The Public With 430 APIs

#27

Post by macca321 »

I don't think central API registries are the the long term future of APIs (despite the fact that I bought apinest.com with half a mind to setting one up :).

At some point we are going to move to self-describing APIs, documented at source. Check out the http://restfulobjects.org/ spec for ideas on how this will work.

Re: The API Hub: Jeff Bezos-Backed Mashape Launches To The Public With 430 APIs

#28

Post by fosk »

macca321 wrote: post #27

I don't think central API registries are the the long term future of APIs (despite the fact that I bought apinest.com with half a mind to setting one up :). At some point we are going to move to self-describing APIs, documented at source. Check out the http://restfulobjects.org/ spec for ideas on how this will work.

Which would be great. We strongly believe that self-describing hypermedia APIs are the future, hopefully sooner or later we'll be able to focus more on the experience (buying/tracking/monitoring/bug tracking) and less on supporting thousands different formats/descriptions. Unfortunately it's still a super-fragmented market.

Re: The API Hub: Jeff Bezos-Backed Mashape Launches To The Public With 430 APIs

#29

Post by firlefans »

scottbruin wrote: post #23
firlefans wrote: post #19

I found Mashape via google as I was looking for a simple way to monetize our API (and get some exposure) about a year ago. We posted our Whois API ( http://www.mashape.com/nametoolkit/name-toolkit ) on Mashape. In the early days it was quiet but I liked the auto-generated clients. It's really been picking up in the last few months and the hassle-free billing, documentation is great. Augusto is great, he is still pers…

Not to rain on your parade, but to anyone looking to try this I just wasted 30 minutes getting setup and trying it to find out that Godaddy, for example, returns next to no results through this service so it's no solution to WHOIS woes.

Firstly, yes our whois parser needs work, whois is a dirty protocol with lots of inconsistency and we haven't spent enough time dealing with parsing ALL the data out. Oddly enough it has already proved useful to some customers and some fields are consistently parsed well. What's your use case and which fields are you interested in that we failed to parse?
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