history.apievangelist.comEvolution of Web APIs

Twitter Github LinkedIn RSS API Evangelist This is a walk through on the history of web APIs, highlighting some of the pioneers who have made the API space what it is. The Commerce SalesForce Ebay Social del.icio.us Flickr Facebook Twitter Business and Marketing ProgrammableWeb Mashery Mapping Google Maps Cloud Computing Amazon S3 Amazon EC2 A Mobile World Foursquare Instagram Twilio Understanding Our API History The History is everything. Understanding where we have come from is critical to knowing where we are going. While pushing forward with the latest technology, it is always healthy to pause and take a look at that pastso let's take a look at the history of APIs. "The concept of an API pre-dates even the advent of personal computing, let alone the Web, by a very long time! The principal of a well documented set of publicly addressable "entry points" that allow an application to interact with another system has been an essential part of software development since the earliest days of utility data processing. However, the advent of distributed systems, and then the web itself, has seen the importance and utility of these same basic concepts increase dramatically." - Martin Bartlett When I talking about APIs, I'm focused one version that was born out of the enterprise, during the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) movement, which sometime around 2000, a portion of the SOA experiment left the enterprise and found a more fertile environment in the world of start-ups. Where we stand in 2016, there are some obvious technical reasons of why web APIs are finding success in companies of all shapes and sizes, and even within government; but not all the reasons for this success is technical. There are many other, less obvious aspects of web APis that have significantly contributed to their success, things we can only learn by closely studying the past and looking at why some of the pioneers of web APIs were successful. In 2016, we need to make sure we emulate the best practices that have been established over the last 13 years, and not ignore some of the critical variables that contribute to the success of early API providers like Amazon, Salesforce, Ebay and Twittermuch of what is still working in 2016. When we look back, we can begin see some clear patterns emerge that have defined the industry. Patterns that need to be emulated, and some that should be avoided. Commerce As soon as the first .COM bubble burst, platforms were looking for innovative ways to syndicate products across e-commerce web sites, and web APIs, built on the backs of existing HTTP infrastructure proved to be the right tool for the job. With this in mind, a handful of tech pioneers stepped up to define the earliest uses of APIs for sales and commerce management, kicking-off a ten year evolution that we can now call the early history of web APIs. However, even with the early success of APIs, they wouldn't reach maturity without several other critical ingredients that would prove as important as essential commerce variables like products, payments and sales. SalesForce February 7th, 2000 Salesforce.com officially launched at the IDG Demo 2000 conference. Salesforce.com launched its enterprise-class, web-based, sales force automation as a "Internet as a service". XML APIs were part of Salesforce.com from day one. Salesforce.com identified that customers needed to share data across their different business applications, and APIs were the way to do this. Marc R. Benioff, chairman and founder of salesforce.com stated, "Salesforce.com is the first solution that truly leverages the Internet to offer the functionality of enterprise-class software at a mere fraction of the cost." Salesforce.com was the first cloud provider to take an enterprise class web application and API and deliver what we know today as Software-as-a-Service. Even with SalesForce being the first mover in the world of web APIs, they are still a powerhouse in 2016. SalesForce continues to lead when it comes to real-time APIs, testing, deployment and most recently taking a lead when it comes to mobile application development and backend as a service (BaaS). Ebay On November 20, 2000, eBay launched the eBay Application Program Interface (API) , along with the eBay Developers Program. The eBay API was originally rolled out to only a select number of licensed eBay partners and developers. As eBay stated: "Our new API has tremendous potential to revolutionize the way people do business on eBay and increase the amount of business transacted on the site, by openly providing the tools that developers need to create applications based on eBay technology, we believe eBay will eventually be tightly woven into many existing sites as well as future e-commerce ventures." The launch of the eBay API was a response to the growing number of applications that were already relying on its site either legitimately or illegitimately. The API aimed to standardize how applications integrated with eBay, and make it easier for partners and developers to build a business around the eBay ecosystem. eBay is considered the leading pioneer in the current era of web-based APIs and web services and still leads with one of the most successful developer ecosystem today. Social As API driven commerce platforms were still getting their footing, and understanding the best way to use APIs, a new breed of technology platforms emerged in the area content and messaging on the web in a way that was very user centric and socially enabling. Publishing user generated content, and the sharing of web links, photos and other media via APIs emerged with this birth of new social platforms between 2003 and 2006. This was an entirely new era for APIs, one that wasn't about money, it was about connections. These new API driven, social platforms would take technology to new global heights, and ensure that applications from here forward, would all always contain essential social features, that were defined via their platform APIs. Social, was an essential ingredient the API industry was missing. del.icio.us del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service for storing, sharing and discovering web bookmarks to web pages, that was founded by Jousha Schachter in 2003. Del.icio.us implemented a very simple tagging system which allowed users to easily tag their web bookmarks in a meaningful way, but also established a kind of folksonomy across all users of the platform. Which proved to be a pretty powerful way for cataloging and sharing web links. The innovative tagging methodology used by del.icio.us allowed you to pull a list of your tags, or public web bookmarks by using the URL http://del.icio.us/tag/[tag name]/. So if I was searching for bookmarks on airplanes, I could http://del.icio.us/tag/airplane and I would GET a list of all bookmarks that have been tagged airplane. It was simple. When it came to the programmatic del.icio.us interface, the API was built into the site, creating a seamless experienceif you wanted the airplane tags via HTML you entered http://del.icio.us/tag/airplane, if you wanted RSS of the tags you entered http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/airplane, and if you wanted XML returned you used http://del.icio.us/api/tag/airplane. This has changed with the modern version of Delicious API. del.icio.us was the first, concrete example of how the web could deliver HTML content, alongside machine readable like RSS and XML, using a URL structure that was simple and human readable. This approach to sharing bookmarks would set the stage for future APIs, in making APIs easy to understand for developers and even non-developers alike. Any slightly technical user could easily parse the XML or RSS, and develop or reverse engineer widgets and apps around del.icio.us content. del.icio.us has been sold twice since its early popularity, which included to Yahoo! in 2005 and AVOS Systems on April, 2011. However del.icio.us was one of the pillar platforms that ushered in the social era...