APIs -- Internet-based web services that take advantage of HTTP, XML, JSON, and many of the REST concepts -- have become prevalent on the Internet, with huge growth in APIs used to construct web apps, mobile apps, embedded devices, internal web services, and other things. Companies like Twitter, Netflix, Twilio, and others have built big businesses on their APIs.
Existing APIs today typically use the HTTP protocol, JSON, and / or XML. Some use SOAP but most use aspects of the "REST" architectural style. Some of these are built using fully Roy-Fielding-approved REST complete with hypermedia links, while others take advantage of the HTTP protocol without being fully hypermedia-driven. It is not our intention to promote or prevent a particular style of API, but to make it possible to discover and use APIs that follow a variety of styles. APIs are nearly always accompanied by documentation that describes how to use them. Thanks to the proliferation of HTTP-based APIs that make use of XML and JSON, armed with suitable documentation and a few tools a developer may be able to quickly make and try API calls right away just by looking at the docs. A microformat or microdata standard for API description could potentially have many benefits to the API community. For instance, API descriptions could be queried via search engine; specialized search engines could be developed to discover new APIs and find changes to existing APIs; and tools for testing and learning APIs could be developed based on the HTML markup. At Apigee, we have been helping providers and consumers of APIs through tools that make it easier to use APIs, and infrastructure that makes it easiser to expose APIs. Enhancing the discoverability and usability of APIs is important to us as a company and we are interested in contributing to an effort to research possible semantic formats for API data. I plan to gather examples of existing API documentation and brainstorm some ideas on the Microformats Wiki, as appropriate. Let me know if you have ideas or would like to contribute -- thanks! _______________________________________________ microformats-new mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-new
