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by Wolf Paulus.
Original Post: Emerging Technology 2005 - Day 3 and 4
Feed Title: Wolf's Web Journal
Feed URL: http://wolfpaulus.com/feed/
Feed Description: Journal - dedicated to excellence, and motivated by enthusiasm to trying new things
This was a totally mind boggling conference, targeting the so-called Alpha-Geeks.
Transformation of the ASP Model
A lot of well known popular Web sites have opened their content to be accessible by other means than the Web browser. This makes it possible to write applications that access those sites' content and remix it with other content.
Access is granted under different licenses and conditions, like limiting the number of request per time period and client or IP, (Yahoo for instance grants 5,000 request from a single IP per day.)
Open APIs makes a service popular
Popular sites that offer API to get to their content include: Ask Jeeves, Flickr, Amazon, Google, Techorati. Yahoo, eBay, PayPal, del.icio.us, etc.
The idea behind this sudden openness seems to be creating mindshare and have and (corporate) developers investing in building solutions, which use the provider's content.
BTW, all sites consider their API in beta, Flickr's api is in beta for a year now. This allows them to make modification at will - not having to care about breaking somebody else code.
SOAP is not too old but looks outdated already
Amazon offers access to their content in multiple ways, including SOAP and pure XML (content simply wrapped in xml tags). 80% of the requests are for this simple pure XML while 80% of Amazon maintenance and support efforts have to be spent on SOAP.
Goggle's Nelson Minar explaining his current work on the Goggle Search API and the Goggle Adwords API and how much he disliked the SOAP RPC model. He though that REST (Representational State Transfer see The Beauty of REST by Jon Udell) and simply parsing XML documents sent by a server wouldn't be such a bad idea at all. Moreover, he confirmed Amazon findings.
The just released Yahoo Search API doesn't even bother with SOAP and offers REST only. I think we all finally got it: the "Simple Object Access Protocol" isn't simple nor does it deal with objects.
IBM's Sam Ruby on the other hand (and not surprisingly I might add) thought that using Web Services Packages like provided for Java and .Net are the blue pills.
What needs to be added here is that all the mentioned sites offer real api in popular languages like Java, C++, etc. meaning that nobody has to deal with the XML or XPATH.
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