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Review my startup idea: One API to rule them all.

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Re: Review my startup idea: One API to rule them all.

#21

Post by Someone »

evv wrote: post #17
eclipxe wrote: post #8

"One thing I haven't found, however, is one API that lets the skilled developer manipulate and search multiple APIs at once." There is one, it is called "the internet"

Yes, but HTML+JS+CSS has helped turn HTTP into an application environment, and not the content transport protocol it once was. REST is popular now, but it's not a real protocol. There's SOAP, but nobody really cares or wants to use it anymore. The web is undoubtedly missing a social content protocol. I predict one will gain popularity in the next couple of years. EDIT tldr: Until my blog has an open and commonly acce…

"There's SOAP, but nobody really cares or wants to use it anymore."

Do you know why? What makes you think we won't end up at

"There's OneAPItoRuleThemAll, but nobody really cares or wants to use it anymore."

or even at

"There's OneAPItoRuleThemAll, but nobody really cares or wants to use it."

If you cannot answer that, I wouldn't bother working on something like this.

Also, who do you think will be interested in having a common protocol? I think the answer will be "those with little data of their own". Big players do not want you to build tools that work together with 'their' data (clear example: Twitter: open while small, but now closing down its API)

Re: Review my startup idea: One API to rule them all.

#25

Post by thingylab »

Do you have any use cases in mind ?

It seems to me that you would mostly act as a proxy between a user and a service, which really doesn't sound too useful unless one actually needs to access dozens of APIs (which doesn't seem to be something that happens often).

Or is your idea really an aggregator (e.g. "find images using such and such keywords" and it returns results from flickr, 500px, ...) ?

Re: Review my startup idea: One API to rule them all.

#26

Post by thekevinjones »

A lot of people are trying to fix this right now. A lot of people think that most API's, even though guided by Oauth or Oauth 2.0, are easy to implement, and it's a huge misconception. So many of the API's have quirks and issues all the time, making it incredibly time consuming to implement, learn, and keep up to date.

Making the process easier is a huge need right now. There are a lot of apps, and it's all becoming more separated. People want to integrate, and it's a pain in the ass to integrate quickly and cleanly.

EmergentOne and Apigee are helping people create standard API's.

Zapier and IFTTT are giving you a UI to meld them together.

Cloudsnap, Singly, and Webshell are all doing what you're describing, each with a different target of apps. Singly and Webshell are seemingly more social, whereas Cloudsnap is more related to business apps.

And of course, YQL, which has been around a long time.

--

Disclosure: I'm a designer for Cloudsnap, and above is my opinion and not necessarily the views of the company.

Re: Review my startup idea: One API to rule them all.

#27

Post by mehdim »

Will you do it for non-developers like

http://Zapier.com, http://IFTTT.com, http://rules.io and http://elastic.io, http://ritc.io , http://kynetx.com/

or more focused on developers like :

http://temboo.com, http://singly.com, http://webscript.io, http://cloudsnap.com, http://script.google.com , http://webshell.io

What would be your main paradigm and what do you want to bring to the ecosystem?

Disclosure : I work for webshell.io and lol to see that your post make reactions of lots of API of APIs company (Singly, Cloudsnap, Ritc.io)

If some one in this page wants to reach us for open discussion for making the web programmable in an easier way team[at]webshell.io

Re: Review my startup idea: One API to rule them all.

#28

Post by evv »

eclipxe wrote: post #20
evv wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but HTML+JS+CSS has helped turn HTTP into an application environment, and not the content transport protocol it once was. REST is popular now, but it's not a real protocol. There's SOAP, but nobody really cares or wants to use it anymore. The web is undoubtedly missing a social content protocol. I predict one will gain popularity in the next couple of years. EDIT tldr: Until my blog has an open and commonly acce…

Hmm. I'm not sure I agree that the web is missing a "social content protocol". What would such a protocol actually do? REST+HTTP are not without their issues, but I'd argue they've been successful in allowing numerous heterogeneous applications to speak with each other, in a reliable and standard fashion for many years. Compared to more complicated protocols such as SOAP, COBRA, DCOM, etc...REST+HTTP is as reliable a…

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE how HTML5/JS/CSS is now a full application environment. We desperately needed networked applications, but now we have them. It is a great way of creating an interface for users.

But we still need application protocols to allow our apps to communicate with each other, and protocols for such have withered as of late. There are a few patterns most APIs need to re-implement:

- Authentication for actions on behalf of users (user XYZ, who I represent, says this..)

- Rich content format

- Content posting (send a link to somebody)

- Simple feedback (like/follow/upvote/downvote)

For these common inter-application actions, HTTP+HTML falls short.

Re: Review my startup idea: One API to rule them all.

#29

Post by evv »

Someone wrote: post #21
evv wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but HTML+JS+CSS has helped turn HTTP into an application environment, and not the content transport protocol it once was. REST is popular now, but it's not a real protocol. There's SOAP, but nobody really cares or wants to use it anymore. The web is undoubtedly missing a social content protocol. I predict one will gain popularity in the next couple of years. EDIT tldr: Until my blog has an open and commonly acce…

"There's SOAP, but nobody really cares or wants to use it anymore." Do you know why? What makes you think we won't end up at "There's OneAPItoRuleThemAll, but nobody really cares or wants to use it anymore." or even at "There's OneAPItoRuleThemAll, but nobody really cares or wants to use it." If you cannot answer that, I wouldn't bother working on something like this. Also, who do you think will be interested in havi…

> Also, who do you think will be interested in having a common protocol? I think the answer will be "those with little data of their own". Big players do not want you to build tools that work together with 'their' data (clear example: Twitter: open while small, but now closing down its API)

This is some scary logic. By that logic, why would great open protocols like HTTP or email have ever gained popularity over proprietary solutions? Do you really think those two protocols are the only perfect and final solutions which will win?

Couldn't you at least try to have a democratic mindset? This is the web, how do you think Twitter ever came to "own" all that data in the first place?

Re: Review my startup idea: One API to rule them all.

#30

Post by lr »

For the IdM side of things, there is SCIM:

http://www.simplecloud.info/

It started as Simple Cloud Identity Management, but once it got to IETF, it was changed to "System for Cross-domain Identity Management". This initiative has been backed by Google, Ping Identity, Salesforce, Cisco, SailPoint, UnboundID, and others. You can see some of these names on one of the RFCs:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-scim-core-schema-00

This API is just for identity management, and it has taken years to get to this point. I think it would take many more to get to a common API for everything else.

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