API Discovery: Can we do better?

But it's all just data, is it not? I was of the opinion that any halfway-decent practitioner of computing has at least half-a-dozen different ways of getting at data or prying open its contents. Nearly every major programming environment -- particularly the ones in play with the HN crowd -- has more-than-adequate facilities for handing data in JSON, XML, and other formats. The interface to the API is usually a matter of sending the right command string over the wire, maybe you have to figure out some authentication ahead of time but most-to-all of this stuff is supposed to be write-once-run-forever. Are there additional steps in the workflow or something?

Part of the reason it is weird to see people talking about "APIs" now is because API is such a core, fundamental concept in programming that to use the term in its present context (as in, a web API which you issue commands via HTTP) does a disservice to all the other APIs out there. When people on HN talk about API considerations they seem to omit the 95% of other use cases there are for APIs outside of the realm of startups and webapps.

For example, bash could be considered an API to the Linux System Base, and bash commands use Linux's syscall API to achieve the user's ends. Syscalls are issued commands over an ABI usually handled by libc, and return data in the format prescribed by the function signature.

My TV presents an API that is accessible over USB. Granted, I am pretty sure that port is only for use by service techs, but if I wanted to I could probably hook up some electronics and figure out the programming interface. Commands are issued through the USB bus and data will (hopefully) come back in some format.

My MIDI keyboard offers an API through buttons, a little LCD panel, and MIDI-over-USB. I issue it commands through button presses on its control panel, or through MIDI or OSC protocols, and it also returns data (either a human-readable response on a LCD screen or more data over the USB wire). In both those cases I'll have to decode that data to figure out whether my command was accepted and/or what to do next.

Finally, a popular web-based CRM solution offers an event-lifecycle and data-tracking API that I have to interface with at work. I issue it commands over HTTPS and it responds in XML-over-HTTP, which like JSON, is fairly easy to parse in any number of different ways, and in any case its responses are only ever in XML so once that was written it was done with.

This is why this "API" dialogue is so strange. It is reductive and if overarching solutions are going to be prescribed than they need to take into account the wider and entire world that concept lives in. I don't see how many of the prescriptions offered help the use cases outside the HN crowd -- in fact I would argue that the author needs to go back and comb existing literature outside of web programming, because the engineering and computer science worlds have been dealing with exactly these problems for decades.

The "APIs" talked about here refer to a very specific type of product for a very specific audience; there is a bigger world out there and people seem to forget that.

  > What do you do if you know that you need an API for a thing, but you don't know who offers that, or who a good one is? Nothing wrong with searching for "email APIs", "payments API", "maps API", etc. - I don't know why you think that's "amateurish".

Search for "[product name] API doc/faq/whatever" or search for code examples of people interfacing with it? It's amateurish because it reflects a clumsy and incomplete understanding of the concept of "API"

Maybe, but that's a problem with the design of the program, and the contents of that response. An API is only the button board, not its layout or the colors of each button. That's up to the program designer.

I agree. I suppose it's just a matter of context, and at least in the web API context it's almost invariably taken to mean "open, accessible, and documented".

OP is about making it even easier to access that documentation.

    > Search for "[product name] API doc/faq/whatever" or search for code examples of people interfacing with it?

That's fine if you know the `[product name]`. The "email APIs" example in OP was about discovery of those product names - who offers open web APIs for email; let me compare them.

JSON-LD[1], a way to express hyperlinks (linked data) in JSON documents, strongly encourages the use of shared vocabularies instead of every API being their own snowflake with their own private vocabulary every developer need to invest a lot of time into understanding. Schema.org is one such vocabulary.

Not having to read documentation to understand whether the "table" property in the JSON document means "coffee table" or "tabular data" is going to save developers worldwide umpteen man-years. Still, most API developers continue creating snowflakes with proprietary designs, protocols and vocabularies.

JSON-LD is a large step in the right direction by making it easy to share vocabularies. Hydra[2] takes the next logical step by standardizing the protocol as well, so no matter what your API does, it has one standardized way to express it.

[1]: http://json-ld.org/ [2]: http://www.hydra-cg.com/