How much does external API integration suck? (survey)

Re:How much does external API integration suck? (survey) by damncabbage on Tuesday June 07, 2011 @01:07AM (#2627985)

   On these integrations and maintenance now versus last
   year (i.e. how much more time are you spending this
   year on these integrations as compared to last year):

Sorry, but this is poorly worded, and doesn't allow you to say you're spending less time integrating APIs this year than last.

(The answer selection is a percentage scale.)

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Re:How much does external API integration suck? (survey) by fleitz on Tuesday June 07, 2011 @01:13AM (#2628000)

Who tracks this? I mean other than just a gut feeling.

And how much of it is integrating an API vs. doing it yourself. (eg. You might be spending twice as much time integrating APIs and half as much time doing it yourself)

Also, does external mean a webservice or a module you didn't write yourself. (eg. Facebook vs. Win32)

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Re:How much does external API integration suck? (survey) by AntiFreeze on Tuesday June 07, 2011 @05:22PM (#2630920)

We were aiming for gut feelings, which is why we went with percentages in the poll.

These are definitely important questions that the poll didn't take into account, that we'll most likely need to address in the near future.

As for external services, we were really looking for anything you did to bring in external data, which could be anything from writing the connectors yourself to just loading a module and passing through some API keys.

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Re:How much does external API integration suck? (survey) by fleitz on Wednesday June 08, 2011 @04:45AM (#2632456)

The biggest problem IMHO with the APIs is inconsistency, for instance on the FB graph API on some calls it gives you a 302 redirect instead of returning JSON.

so instead of { image: "http://foo.com/image.jpg } you have to catch the Location header and write it into your object.

Next up would be how to represent a date in JSON which seems to vary between an time_t cast to an "int" and a string in ISO-8601 format.

Lets not even get started on XML and attributes vs. elements.

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Re:How much does external API integration suck? (survey) by AntiFreeze on Tuesday June 07, 2011 @05:19PM (#2630912)

You're absolutely right. We totally screwed that one up, and it just didn't make sense to change it mid-poll.

Honestly, in all the work we've been doing (and the work our friends have been doing), it appeared obvious to us that integration was consistently getting worse and we were curious how much worse.

It is now abundantly clear that we were completely off base here. Guess we'll have to run another survey soon with much better answer choices given what we've already learned in less than a day.

Thanks for the feedback and taking the survey!

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