Re: 1st Best Practice (was: APIs to work with data on the web)

Yaso,

This is an interesting point. If data is available in a database or catalog, and can be queried and extracted by sending standard requests to the repository, what additional would be derived by using an API?  And if there is a value, should every catalog vendor use standardized or even Open APIs?

 
Regards,

Steve


----- Original Message -----
From: Yaso [yaso@nic.br]
Sent: 03/17/2014 10:35 AM ZW3
To: public-dwbp-wg@w3.org
Subject: 1st Best Practice (was: APIs to work with data on the web)



Seems to me that we have our 1st best practice :-)

I understand the point when the author (Ruben) writes that "the point is
that none of this complexity is necessary." - I would go further: I
agree  with ​​Bret Victor's idea of [1] directed/logic programming
instead of API's. But we cannot deny that the market for API's is huge
and that many developers use APIs for working with cloud data for the
web, for example.

For this group makes sense to talk about Rest APi's and recommend it's
use as a best practice, I think. It would be interesting if we can
gather some use cases that use Rest API's, just like one of Twitter's
API's [2] or even one of Youtube's Rest API's.

By the way, I disagree that it is so complicated to provide an
interface that only computers understand, since the operation don't need
to be transparent to the user. It can be a bad practice, but I do not
think that we can generalize as waste of time.

For every 5 cases of developers working with data on the Web, I can say
for sure that at least 3 of them use API's to "make the job easier." So
I think that it's an important point for the Best Practices that we are
working on.


yaso

[1] https://vimeo.com/71278954
[2] https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1





Em 3/17/14, 10:19 AM, Newton Calegari escreveu:
> Hi Laufer, I didn't know the Socrata.
> Thanks for share the link, Makx. Very interesting text and point of view about APIs.
> 
> BR,
> 
> Newton
> 
> Em 14/03/2014, à(s) 15:58, Makx Dekkers <mail@makxdekkers.com> escreveu:
> 
>> For a different perspective on APIs, see this: http://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2013/11/29/the-lie-of-the-api/
>>  
>> Makx.
>>  
>> From: Newton Calegari [mailto:newton@nic.br] 
>> Sent: Thursday, March 13, 2014 6:03 PM
>> To: public-dwbp-wg@w3.org
>> Subject: APIs to work with data on the web
>>  
>> Hi all,
>>  
>>           Last week, Yaso and I were talking about APIs and how they are important in all aspects of data on the web. APIs are one of the simplest ways to access and to distribute data across the web, and we think that is an important subject to be discussed on the WG.
>>           To talk about APIs, we obviously need to discuss about URI and descriptors. Carrasco written the first document [1] about it, besides there are a few messages discussing it.
>>           Moreover, I want to share some links I consider relevant and useful to discuss about this topic. 
>>           Joshua Bloch, a software engineer and former Googler, published an article on InfoQ [2] site and made a presentation called “How to Design a Good API & Why it Matters” [3] (other Jushua's presentation about the same subject, but the video is hosted on YouTube [4]). These links are very interesting and I recommend to all of you, even who is already expert in API design.
>>  
>> [1] Data on the Web URI Best Practices: http://www.w3.org/2013/dwbp/wiki/Data_on_the_Web_URI_Best_Practices
>> [2] Joshua Bloch: Bumper-Sticker API Design: http://www.infoq.com/articles/API-Design-Joshua-Bloch?utm_source=buffer&utm_campaign=Buffer&utm_content=buffer36801&utm_medium=twitter#.UvbdCPy0BT0.delicious
>> [3] How to Design a Good API & Why it Matters: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/effective-api-design
>> [4] How to Design a Good API & Why it Matters (YouTube version): https://www.youtube..com/watch?v=aAb7hSCtvGw
>>  
>> Best Regards,
>> Newton
> 
> 


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Received on Monday, 17 March 2014 13:50:25 UTC