Steven Willmott

There's a interesting post over on the Apigee blog this week on the role of API proxies for Web App development ("Why modern applications need an API proxy") and it's a great opportunity for some debate. (We actually left a comment on the blog - but it seems it hasn't made it onto the page yet - hopefully it will shortly.) via techblog.3scale.net This is certainly an interesting debate - proxy's certainly have their uses (and we have some great ideas on what to do with them), but for many infrastructure tasks your often (much) better off without one. ... (more)

MVC for the Cloud

While planning for a talk at Cloud Expo Europe a few weeks ago I was thinking about appropriate metaphors for the way APIs are changing the web. Although the title was APIs as glue for the Cloud, I think the core metaphor behind it deserves some explanation: MVC for the Cloud. I thought I'd add some notes here as to what this might mean. MVC or Model View Controller is an architectural pattern for software that seperates out three import things - Models (or Data), Views (visualisation of that data) and Controllers (operations on the data). Since it's invention at Xerox Parc in t... (more)

Twitter client restrictions - bad for everybody (including Twitter)

It's a shame to see Twitter putting restrictions on client development via their API (more on GigaOm here). Obviously there's speculation as to what the business reasons might be - and the effect on the ecosystem - the move seems more than likely to be about controlling advertising real estate. The original post is here.  The post makes some valid points about privacy and no doubt Twitters transition to the consumer mainstream has promted some of this, but it still seems to be unfortunate step. Quote from Ryan Carver (via techcrunch):  “We need to move to a less fragmented world... (more)

Open APIs and Open Standards

John Borthwick has been advising companies for a while now to build APIs that mimic the Twitter API. His reasoning is that if your API look and feels similar to the Twitter API then third party developers will have an easier time adopting it and building to it. Makes sense to me. via www.avc.com There was a great thread on AVC this week on the impact of Twitter's API specs being reused by others (check out the lengthy comments thread as well). I think this is the beginning of a trend and we'll see a lot more of it in different types of apps: APIs for different content types are li... (more)

Standards in the Age of Facebook

They have 400 million users and 500 million people visit the site each month. Only Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have more monthly visitors than Facebook. And only Google has more page views. And they aren’t done growing yet. In a year they will likely be second on the list of unique visitors. In two years, they’ll probably be first. via techcrunch.com In all the discussion about the open graph release by Facebook (more here), I think this is the real point behind the story. Facebook has done an amazing job of using the power of the network effect to build a huge, active and growi... (more)