Ask HN: What are some examples of good APIs?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3540809

by bbq • 14 years ago

3 3 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

With the recent talk on APIs and RESTful interfaces, I am curious to hear the community's experiences with APIs in the wild. What makes one API good as contrasted with another? What are the qualities one looks for in an API?

Aqua_Geek• 14 years ago

The first two examples that come to mind of what I would deem "good" APIs are:

* GitHub: http://developer.github.com

* Stripe: https://stripe.com/docs/api

Both are easy-to-use and very well documented. The examples listed in Stripe's actually work - they're hooked up to a test account, so you can copy-paste into your terminal and start interacting with it immediately.

-- Edit --

To give you an example of a bad API: I'm currently working with a large corp's API, and it's just awful. It's horrendously slow (10+ second response times); everything hits a single URL; the HTTP status of the response is always 200; node names in the response are misspelled and trncated awkwardly; the documentation is virtually non-existant; some response nodes provide inaccurate information. The list goes on.

bbq• 14 years ago

That sounds painful.

Stripe's API does look good. I was actually perusing it just now after reading their webhooks post.

Now it's time to give the GitHub docs a good read. Thanks!

ifyouwillit• 14 years ago

also, any API with a comprehensive developer community like facebook or twitter is a good place to start looking for inspiration too.

Ask HN: What are some examples of good APIs?

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