Re:API Integration Pain? Ouch. (HN Survey Results)
by pyre on Thursday August 11, 2011 @02:42PM
(#2874171)
I had issues with the Posterous API (though I shelved that work a while back):
* The basic authorization didn't follow spec. Some frameworks handled this well (Perl's LWP::UserAgent), while others didn't (Python's urllib2 and httplib2). Apparently you're supposed to try the page w/o auth, get a 401 response back, then send the auth credentials, but Posterous' API was not doing this.
* Once you have an auth token, the API wouldn't allow me to authorize with it. I ended up sending basic auth for each API call for non-public calls.
* Some of the API calls would return 500 errors (namely the subscription related ones).
Granted this was prior to them releasing their snazzy new interactive API test page. I haven't gone back to touch that project since then, though I imagine that issues like this are common to a lot of APIs. How many of them are found and patched depends on how many developers are using the API and how responsive the API dev team is.
* The basic authorization didn't follow spec. Some frameworks handled this well (Perl's LWP::UserAgent), while others didn't (Python's urllib2 and httplib2). Apparently you're supposed to try the page w/o auth, get a 401 response back, then send the auth credentials, but Posterous' API was not doing this.
* Once you have an auth token, the API wouldn't allow me to authorize with it. I ended up sending basic auth for each API call for non-public calls.
* Some of the API calls would return 500 errors (namely the subscription related ones).
Granted this was prior to them releasing their snazzy new interactive API test page. I haven't gone back to touch that project since then, though I imagine that issues like this are common to a lot of APIs. How many of them are found and patched depends on how many developers are using the API and how responsive the API dev team is.