REST and RSS are all we need for APIs
Posted by matt on 26 Jul 2006 | Tagged as: rss, REST, xml-rpc, tailrank, kevinburton, digg, api
The title makes me drowsy.
Kevin Burton of Tailrank has some good advice for Digg :
They’re basically reinventing RSS which just shouldn’t be done. The problem isn’t that Digg can’t do a good job inventing a new format - people already understand RSS. There are already tools that parse RSS and there are cool tools like the RSS validator which don’t work for Digg’s API (but would if they used RSS).
I thought I’d check the facts out first since Kevin could be considered a competitor. It’s definitely true that the marginal benefit they might receive from rolling their own XML is clearly not as great as the loss they will incur by not using RSS.
Kevin continues :
Want to see a good RSS API implementation? Check out Tailrank
Well, if you don’t say so yourself! ; )
But really, it’s true that Tailrank has done a fine job using it’s API with standards like REST and RSS to open it’s data up to the developer community.
It’s also nice to make xml-rpc available as an option for certain things or as an alternative.
I haven’t figured out why most REST advocates tend to think in nouns whereas remote procedures usually are verbs.
In his example, Kevin is using verb-like REST calls. So he is a rebel.
I don’t see any problem with it, but I’m open to be enlightened as to why it might be.
Tailrank *might* be a competitor but in terms of RSS *I’m* not.. Having RSS would be good for Digg and I don’t have a problem with that.
I also sent an email to a Digg developer noting that I’d throw in some help if he needed it….
For the record… we *do* have XMLRPC but its just not documented yet :-/
If someone wanted to implement something on top of Tailrank and needed XMLRPC I’d just throw together some docs…
Kevin
That’s good to know, Kevin. Thanks for the comment.