The Web - Apps to APIs

Recently and much belatedly I finally got around to listening to some of the podcasts from the Carson Workshop’s ”The Future of Web Apps” summit which was held in February. Being a novice programmer I did wonder beforehand how much would go straight over my head but the talk by Cal Henderson (formerly of Flickr, now Yahoo!) subtitled “Ten Principles of Building Web 2.0 Apps” was perfectly accessible and a must for anyone who sees their future organising data for the web.

For me the most eye-opening chapter was about building a web API for your data so that third parties can use it in a machine-readable format to create different applications around that data. Although this sounds like giving away something for nothing, Henderson cites a number of direct benefits to having this third-party usage which can offset the cost of writing the API: it generates interest in your original application; it generates new sign-ups to your application which is good for the existing community and good for the newbies; and you don’t have to build the interface, the other developers will. From a practical point of view it avoids third parties having to harvest your data from your output web pages (which they will do anyway if they want it badly enough) which would put more strain on your bandwidth and throttling than the ‘clean’ data supplied through the API.

There’s also the added ‘wow’ factor when it’s something the original developers would not have thought of: quoted as an example was Fastr, a third-party game built on Flickr’s API, where players have to guess the common theme ("tag") in a selection of photos from Flickr’s database. Difficult to develop and tricky to support for a large online userbase, and just a little bit mad, this game wouldn’t have been desirable as part of the core Flickr application yet brings all the stated benefits to the mainstream Flickr community.

The principle of abstracting web content (HTML/XHTML) from presentation (CSS) from behaviour (JS, etc) has long been the ‘holy grail’ of good practise but not being a programmer I’d never made the leap to pure data output so Henderson’s conclusion came as a bit of a bombshell: He said, first we had web pages, then web apps, and now with APIs all you have to do is serve the data and let people build their own interface and manipulate it how they please.

Beautiful, innit?