API Developer Weekly – August 11, 2016 – Issue #124
A hand-curated weekly newsletter for API developers, published with permission from LaunchAny and CaseySoftware.
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Hot Topics
How Singapore will run the country using APIs
Say you have an animal problem in your neighborhood in Singapore. Who do you report this to? It depends on whether the animal’s dead or alive, domestic or wild. And if it’s a bird, is it a crow? The combination of your answers determines who you’d talk to. by Terence Lee, Bright Zheng, John Valustik, Happy Mashaper, Jeremy Chew, Peter Rothenberg [techinasia.com]
Comparing the Top Five Computer Vision APIs
Over the last six months, Google, Microsoft, and IBM have all announced a suite of “intelligent APIs” that offer various types of image, video, speech, and text recognition. One can, for instance, pass in a photograph of a day at the park, and receive tags that tell you it includes a dog, frisbee, and trees. by Gaurav Oberoi [goberoi.com]
Fielding Property Maps
This page demonstrates an HTTP resource update pattern based on an idea by Roy Fielding. At the end of a post on the topic of WebDAV semantics, Fielding illustrates one way to expose and manipulate a set of properties for a resource using a URI convention (similar to that used for HTML image maps) where appending ;props to a resource URI allows clients to access any available properties for that resource. [amundsen.com]
Shaming People For Not Being Or Understanding REST Is Why We Have So Much Inconsistency In API Design
I was reading some of the blog posts, Reddit and Hacker News threads about Microsoft’s release of their API design guid e. While many of the comments are technically correct, the tone in which they are delivered, and the intent behind their delivery is one of the biggest contributing factors to why we have such wild inconsistencies in API design across the landscape. [apievangelist.com]
API360 Microservices Summit – One-on-one with Mel Conway and Mike Amundsen
This session features a one-on-one discussion between API Academy Director of Architecture, Mike Amundsen, and noted educator and inventor Mel Conway, as they discuss Mr. Conway’s sixty years spent humanizing the craft of software development. by CA Technologies [youtube.com]
The Architecture that Helps Stripe Move Faster
Evan Broder talks about how Stripe has designed the systems to speed up the development process and how the software infrastructure in their API enables the next generation of tech companies to build faster and less painfully. Then, he examines how Stripe solves PCI and compliance concerns in a way that allows their engineering teams to develop new features more quickly. [infoq.com]
Pokemon Go API Fiasco Exemplifies Mobile API Security Concerns
It seems as though just about everyone lately is either playing or talking about the runaway phenomenon that is Pokemon Go. Pokemon Go may be one of the fastest, if not the fastest, growing mobile games the world has ever seen. [programmableweb.com]
The Role of Webhooks in the API World
The main advantage of the webhooks pattern is that your application doesn’t have to make periodic calls to APIs while it’s waiting for changes. Instead, APIs will call your application on a specific endpoint informing that something interesting has happened. What’s missing is a way to programmatically tell APIs that you’re interested in receiving calls and registering endpoints. [dzone.com]
Explore and learn cool DHC features
We introduced a new feature to help you quickly explore and learn useful tips and hints on how to become more productive with . It is not easy to find a non intrusive way how to incorporate this into . by Filip Kolarik [restlet.com]
Paw 3 API Tool for Mac Has Been Released
Paw version 3 has been released and includes new features such as Paw for Teams, a dark theme, interface improvements, and several bug fixes. Paw is a native Mac HTTP client for testing REST APIs and features code generators, advanced support for cookies and sessions, and more. [programmableweb.com]
API Digest #50: The Web is (Finally) a Mature Platform
A fresh API Digest is here again to provide you with the most interesting API news, articles and insights of the last fortnight. In this issue: how moving to API-First Architecture helps to solve performance problems, use cases for API consumption, how APIs help to smartly use tools and save time, how API are going to influence our routine and many more. [api2cart.com]
APIStrat Boston 2016
APIStrat Boston – under the direction of our 2016 Program Chair Lorinda Brandon – is already shaping up to be our best program ever. Our three days of workshops, keynotes, fireside chats and speaker sessions 2016 reflect the maturity and diversity of the API business and community today. [boston2016.apistrat.com]
REST Fest – RESTful Web Services Unconference in Greenville, SC, USA – September 15 – 17, 2016
REST Fest is a unique blend of presentations and collaborative unconference goodness. The keynote sits directly in the middle of the conference schedule with hackday, workshop, session, talks, and 5-in-5 lightening talks surrounding it. [2016.restfest.org]
Upcoming Web API Events
A list of upcoming Web API Events, maintained by Matthew Reinbold
The Business of APIs
Uri Sarid on RAML 1.0 Release and Latest MuleSoft API News
InfoQ had the opportunity to speak with Uri Sarid, the CTO of MuleSoft at their CONNECT 2016 annual conference in San Francisco. Sarid is the creator of RAML, which just released its long awaited version 1.0 in GA, so it was a good opportunity to follow-up from last year’s interview and also to get a broader view on MuleSoft’s solutions for API teams and his vision for APIs. [infoq.com]
Access To Satellite Imagery Via A Web API
For me the Astro Digital satellite imagery API demonstrates for me the power of the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) and the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI)–I can get a snapshot of any location on earth, and manipulate my view of it using a single URI, from within any web or mobile application. [apievangelist.com]
Dash Replenishment Service
Amazon’s Dash Replenishment Service (DRS) service enables connected devices to order physical goods when supplies are running low. [developer.amazon.com]
Microsoft’s Excel API Now Generally Available
Microsoft has announced the general availability of its Microsoft Excel REST API for Office 365. Through the API, developers can integrate the popular business tool with third party applications to enhance the value of data, reporting, and dashboards. The Excel API represents another step in Microsoft’s journey to make Office an open developer platform. [programmableweb.com]
I hated writing documentation so I founded a company
People tell you to start a company around doing what you love. I founded a company to stop doing what I hated-documentation. I started my career as a developer at Mozilla working with PHP, before rising through the ranks to Python. After I decided to leave Mozilla, I did [blog.readme.io]
RIP ROI: Time-To-Market is the New Indicator of Success
In the digital economy, you have to assume that the fundamentals of any market will change by the time your product reaches it. You may not know how it will change but you should assume it will change. This means the best indicator of success will likely be time-to-market (TTM). [linkedin.com]
5 Rookie Mistakes That Can Destroy Your API Strategy
Working on an API? Take care to avoid these easy-to-make mistakes to make sure your project doesn’t fall flat. [dzone.com]
(Un)Related Topics
Scaling Uber to 1,000 Services
Matt Ranney talks about Uber’s growth and how they’ve embraced microservices. This has led to an explosion of new services, crossing over 1,000 production services in early March 2016. He “acknowledges the pain” in growing the architecture at an explosive growth company, and he describes how we might benefit from their pain points and learn from one of the fastest growing software companies. [infoq.com]
4 reasons why microservices resonate
(From 2015, but still a great read) We just finished the first O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference and the overwhelming most popular topic was microservices. Why all the hype about an architectural style? The DevOps revolution highlighted how much inadvertent friction an outdated operations mindset can cause, starting the move towards automating away manual tasks. by Neal Ford [oreilly.com]
What’s Better Than Microservices? Serverless Microservices | Apigee
In this webcast replay, Autodesk technologist Alan Williams and AWS solution architect Asha Chakrabarty discuss real-world microservices examples. [apigee.com]
Scaling Container Architectures with OSS & Mesos
David Greenberg discusses how Two Sigma was able to scale up their research to harness tens of thousands of CPUs, and some of the challenges faced along the road to increasing the number of machines and the solutions they engineered to build a platform. [infoq.com]
XMPP: Swiss Army Knife for Internet of Things (IoT) – Security Compass
IoT communication is complex and varied, and XMPP, the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, is a great candidate for an application… by Security Compass [blog.securitycompass.com]
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