If it ain’t got an API…
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
We spent some of Friday powering up and down the 101, meeting folk at both Serena and Yahoo!.
There was a common theme to the meetings - the power of open APIs to power the next generation of consumer and business applications. It’s well documented, discoverable, APIs let us build the complex mashups of services and processes.
Discoverable is the key word. We need to be able to automate API access in our development tools, whether they’re GUIs like Serena’s new business mash-up tool, or whether they’re JavaScript code in my web development tool of choice, Aptana.
Yahoo! has been working on API-level tooling for sometime now, and a recurring theme of our lunch conversation was summed up in a question from a developer evangelist: “What APIs can we offer you next?” It was a question that made me think, as Yahoo!’s APIs have been at the heart of the web applications I’ve been writing recently. It’s Yahoo! Local Search that geocodes my postcodes for me, and Yahoo! Pipes that converts any web service into a simple JSON operator I can use in JavaScript to build cross-service mashups that down fall foul of the browser security model.
The latest tool to come out of Yahoo!’s research teams is Fire Eagle, a universal location broker. Tell Fire Eagle where you are, and you can share your location with applications that you’ve given access rights. The Fire Eagle API is designed to handle location information (along with the details of the providing service, so you know how accurate the information is), and authentication (making sure the right person gets the right level of detail).
APIs like these are a key to delivering on two key visions: cloud computing and SOA. When you’re using Fire Eagl, you’re subscribing to a service, either as an information provider or an information consumer. You’re also taking advantage of the infrastructure Yahoo!’s built, using compute resources in the cloud to manage your individual location information.
Analyst James Governor came up with an interesting list of signs that something isn’t cloud computing. At number 5 on the list was this: If there is no API
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