Tweet Image via CrunchBase I am walking through the Box.net OpenBox Developer area tonight. Box.net offers a pretty robust set of API for managing files and content on the box.net platform. It is a great example of a very robust API. They get you started with: Introduction to OpenBox Actions Getting Started Guide for API [...]
Tweet The ability to explain your API to developers and potential consumers is critical to the success of your API Ecosystem. Whether its core API docs, samples, training materials or marketing materials your documentation needs to tell the story of your API and the business problems it solves. I was just reviewing services offered by [...]
Tweet I’m reviewing four major Application Programming Interfaces (API) today. Zendesk, Scribd, Twilio, and Evernote. These are all top web 2.0 or cloud applications. Whichever label you wish to apply. I am evaluating the different approaches to delivering their API Ecosystem: Zendesk – Offers web-based customer support software and their API is pretty much a [...]
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Tweet I have been reviewing a lot of APIs lately. I”m evaluating their potential for integration into applications. As I’m going through I”m also evaluating how they deliver their API community. I was checking out the Scribd API tonight, and I like their delivery. Its pretty straightforward. It has the following API building blocks: API [...]
Tweet I’m spending time going through RedHat’s Deltacloud set of cloud APIs. They recently recently moved the project to the Apache Incubator and submitted it to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) . With the Deltacloud API you can start an instance on an internal cloud, then with the same code start another on Amazon [...]
Tweet I am needing more programmatic control over my Amazon EC2 environment. I am rebuilding all server instances on my Amazon Web Services network. I needed to reconfigure using EBS Volumes for file and data storage, and upgrade the operating systems and some applications while I’m at it. So I’m creating all new AMI as [...]
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Tweet I had a chance to play with the AlchemyAPI I came across today. AlchemyAPI is a semantic tagging and text mining Application Programming Interface (API). I have about 10K web pages I want to extract top keywords and key phrases from. I want meaning extracted from the words on each page. AlchemyAPI provides nine [...]
Tweet I have a “hobby” harvesting project going on right now. I’m am harvesting several thousand web pages from various locations on a certain topic. I’m not really interested in the content itself, but the top keywords that are used in the content. I pulled the page and extracted the body content that I am [...]
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Tweet I’m seeing a lot of chatter on the Internets lately about API development and best practices. Like 10 Common Mistakes Made by API Providers at RWW and APIs: an Important Part of Product Strategy at ProgrammableWeb. I had the pleasure of sitting with the engineer from Mashery a couple weeks ago and listen to [...]
Tweet A positive feedback loop can occur whenever an API becomes popular, it keeps becoming more and more popular due to network effects. The most important network effects are: API gets support by partners API gets support by vendors Developers are more likely to already know how to use it. This feedback loop and network [...]
Tweet I am still processing a great post at High Scalability called, Scaling an AWS infrastructure – Tools and Patterns. They cover several tools you can use to take advantage of Amazon’s Web Service and suggest an architectural model you should adopt for a scalable infrastructure in the cloud. They suggest the following tools for [...]
Tweet I was reading a good post on getting your API right. They propose following these rules when developing your API: Use HTTP Use Your Verbs Keep Your URL/URIs Consistent Use Your Status Codes Expose (And Accept) Multiple Data Formats Protect Your Users with OAuth Don’t Shut Off HTTP Authentication Entirely Document, Document, Document There [...]
Tweet Last night I went through 25 of the top Application Programming Interfaces (API), and documented what type of services they offer as part of their API Ecoystem. I’m trying to get a handle on best approaches to delivering an API. I’m still processing this information but so far I have these API Ecosystem building [...]
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Tweet I am fascinated by APIs. I got to listen to the engineer from Mashery talk about their API services the other day. Ever since then I’ve been thinking a lot more about APIs. I just reviewed 25 top APIs out there: Flickr API Evernote Twitter Delicious Youtube Facebook Ebay Last.fm Digg Box.net Bing Salesforce [...]
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Tweet A couple of weeks ago I was writing about tools you should offer with your Application Programming Interface (API). I was putting together some thoughts on ways a vendor could improve their API developer experience. I have several deployments with their API under my belt and felt I had some advice to offer. We [...]
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Tweet I am spending some time putting together some recommendations for a vendor on their API. They are a payment gateway, that offers something no other payment gateway offers. I really feel they could rock the market if they were better known. The problem is that they don’t have a product manager and their Application [...]
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Tweet Dropbox just launched a new application programming interface (API) for their popular cloud storage platform. The RESTful API allows you to exchange, distribute or access files on a user’s desktop. The API offers the following features: Simple HTTP+JSON method of accessing a user’s information in a user approved sandbox on the user’s desktop. List, [...]
Tweet I was just reading on the Programmable Web blog that they were acquired by Alcatel-Lucent. Not sure what this means for their content and direction. I have always followed programmable web because they are the best place to discover new APIs. Hopefully they can stay objective and stay focused on the next generation of [...]
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Tweet I wanted to reintroduce everyone to Google Charts. If you haven’t heard about it, it is a quick and easy way to create chart from data sources. It is so easy to use. I think it is a tool that more people need to hear about and understand how they can easily use to [...]
Tweet I came across a blog post in the Huffington Post called, “Schwarzenegger Proposes Budget For ‘Tough Times‘”. So I went and checked out the California Proposed Budget for 2010 and 2011. I am seeing a lot of PDF documents available regarding the budget, but no data feeds or spreadsheets. I went ahead and plugged [...]