[defrag] Jud Valeski
Jud Valeski of Gnip is talking about the rise of APIs. There’s ben a doubling of publicly available API’s in the past few years, Jud says. He shows Wired’s “The Web is dead” chart that shows the proportion of bits moving through the tubes. But, API usage shows the Web is not dead.
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NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people. |
He divides APIs into two buckets. Functional APIs make periodic calls for bits of information, and are heavily cacheable because there’s static data on the other side. Most of the problems are solved: REST has won, along with Curl.
Volume APIs are a different matter. Call frequency and throughput are high, “and things get wonky.” The call characteristics change. Local programming challenges fall out into the network and cause problems, e.g. queuing.
We don’t yet know how to deal with SLAs (service level agreements). Open network toopology APIs don’t have clear SLAs.
He minimizes the shock by leveragng best practices, finding comonoality in the frameowkr (mashery.com, apigee.com, gnip.com), builing APIs that set the standard.
