Charles Darwin, the author of theory of evolution, would find ample scientific material by researching the development of Web APIs. In response to the demands of the web application market, they evolve at an incredible speed and only the fittest can adapt and be successful with developers. As competition among service providers, from cloud computing to social networks to other trending solutions, intensifies, the quality of APIs they will open up for application developers and their adaptive instincts in this respect are likely to determine interest from outside developers. Failure to attract them can quickly translate in a failure of a business to take off.
Mashery, an API management company, has conducted a survey of IT professionals asking what makes an attractive application programming interface. It is a handy how-to guide for API designers and a foretaste of which direction developer interfaces can float in the future, because there is no doubt that they are here to stay for longer.
Interestingly, the first position on the list went to good documentation, easy to follow and learn from. Respondents gave examples of such APIs as those published by Amazon, Twitter or Google. In a way, this contradicts opinions of those pros who would love to see less documentation and more code samples with their deployment in context that can be explored for guidance on further implementation. In fact, it is not hard to imagine a compromise of sorts between these two approaches.
Stability was the second primary concern, as developers expect their applications that are built around external APIs not to experience major breakdown as things change on the provider’s side. Static APIs make it possible to plan long-term engagement and build business models that reflect the stability of the system.
The survey identified mobile web application development as the area of greatest activity, with outsourcing developers seeing the easiest pathway to making a profit from their products there. Hand-held devices like tablets are a hot area too, with most companies wanting to be present in this market as soon as possible.
Mashery survey and ongoing developments in the business of web applications show that APIs have allowed developers to fit better between customers and businesses with their services. It is a three-way relationship in which everyone seems to benefit: customers by getting new tools and solutions, developers by benefiting from their apps and API providers by extending the reach of their business as their assets are put to work in new, creative ways practically without their intervention. Well, the only intervention they need to secure is building a functionality that outsiders want to use and sharing a well-designed API with outside developers.
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