Re: 2 APIs and the charter

On 2015-02-11 08:53 PM, Sandro Hawke wrote:
>
> I agree with your reading of the charter, etc, but I think it still 
> makes sense to imagine two distinct APIs.
> [...]
>
Sandro,

Very well said.

I think having only a client-to-server API is an interesting exercise 
that doesn't scale well. It gets particularly tricky if you support 
following. Either you have:

 1. a polling mode where clients repeatedly fetch the feeds of every
    person the user "follows" and merges them into a single "inbox" feed
    on the client side, or
 2. the client has to write every update to every follower's server-side
    inbox feed each time the user updates.

In either case, it gets really unwieldy at scales of dozens of 
followers, much less the tens of thousands you see on a site like 
identi.ca or the millions you see on a site like Twitter. Fan-out, 
retries, and exponential backoff become pretty hard to manage from a 
smartphone application.

On top of that, you need to have a universal authentication system that 
allows Alice, with an account on serverA, to write data /as Alice/ on 
serverB (and to read data, if you have any kind of privacy controls). 
Probably client-side certs, I'd imagine from Henry's perspective, but 
that's a hard sell.

-Evan