“APIs are how we are going to build software in the future,” he
said. “We are just going to glue it together.”
Err... folks... from
this software developer:
That's how it's always been done since the first
programmers realized they could feed the results of one program directly into
another!
From the article:
API as a
product
Monetizing APIs
I can see the
future now:
A bunch of PHB's are going to have their developers "focused
on creating API's, create nothing but an API, if you are not creating an API you
are not creating something that can be billed out".
And no matter how
much we developers try and tell them:
The value isn't in the API, the value
is in the code underlying the API!
There will be those that simply do not
pay attention.
As a very clear example for the non-software developers
that visit. Here's an API:
To_Number( in_value character ) return
numeric
That's it. That's the 'API'. In it's entirety. Now, the
underlying code will have such things as:
Validation checks to ensure no
character in the incoming value is a non-numeric value
Appropriate
error messages if the value is non numeric - like the letter A
A
conversion from one data type (character) to another (numeric)
But that's
the implementation of the code. It's not the API. The API is nothing
but:
To_Number( in_value character ) return numeric
Someone out there
is seriously missing the fact that any money being "made on API's" is in the
form of answers to questions like:
how many times is someone accessing our
underlying code base
And just to clarify a point:
APIs are
quickly becoming a necessity for online services and for enterprises as users
demand application access from anywhere with any device.
APIs have
always been a necessity. And when a specific programming API isn't available
where one would be handy, software developers like myself create and use such
software as the simple html parser in Perl. Where only the "gui" was built, we
strip out the raw data and use that.
Magic in a box:
PHB: Build the
api, don't work on the underlying code, that has no value!
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