[portland] OS Bridge proposal date extended

[Micah Elliott]

On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 1:58 PM, Jeff Schwaber <freyley at gmail.com> wrote:

> What do you want to hear talked about? Let's hear about it on
> the list and maybe it'll spark somebody's interest.

Good idea.

I would find it useful for someone to talk generally about web
APIs.  They're everywhere, and have a lot of similarities.  Some
interesting things about APIs might be:

 * Why most sites need an API for sharing their data.

 * Walkthru of some mainstream APIs out there: twitter, flickr,
   netflix, facebook.  Use one as a case study for an API Done
   Right.

 * What makes a good API?  I've seen some pretty bad ones.

 * What languages to support?  Sometimes Python is not considered
   top-5 for some reason.

 * What are the underlying implementation similarities?

 * Tying a language API to a RESTful URL design.  (This might
   turn it into a REST talk though.)

 * API performance considerations.

 * How search is often not part of an API, but a separate need
   and maybe a separate API.

 * How to manage/host one so it doesn't stagnate and get forked.

 * Documentation practices (to make it work well in ipython).

I'm missing some points.  Feel free to expand.  The talk would be
geared towards Python, but other languages could benefit.

I could consider trying to write up my ideas on this, but not
sure I have time right now, and I'm probably not qualified to
give a best practices talk since I have not implemented my own
yet, and I'm not a REST expert.  So anyone is welcome to it.  I'd
probably co-present/-develop if someone wanted a partner.  (I do
actually have a need to write an API one of these days.)

-- 
@MicahElliott | mde at MicahElliott.com | http://MicahElliott.com
Sent from Beaverton, OR, United States