Friday, January 19, 2007

API's to powerfull to be free

Discussing the dapper API ( see my previous post) with some colleague's at work we are wondering if we can use this in real live commercial projects, even if we can use any API in real live projects. This question became even more clear when GOOGLE changed it’s API ‘s from SOAP to Ajax.

When you don’t have to pay for an API or it is from a small company, the life-span can be insecure. Can you build you own commercial service on that kind of base, I think not. So in this light I would rather buy an API from a well-established company then from a small startup. API’s are to power full to be free.

That's why I like Mashery . Their service is designed to provide an out-the-box hosted solution provisioning and managing API's. This includes a lot of the often under-appreciated details that make providing an API actually deliver results such as developer community tools — forums, dev blog and news, wikis, documentation, etc — as well as infrastructure tools for API metering, developer key management, and metrics.

http://blog.programmableweb.com/2006/11/08/api-outsourcing-via-mashery/

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