#apise

On March 31st I will be one of the speakers at the Nordic APIs conference in Stockholm. API stands for Application Programming Interface and it is a specification on how some software components should interact with each other. The title of my talk will be Open Standards and APIs for a Better World and this is part of the description of my session: 

How can open standards and APIs be used to improve public service delivery in the developing world? What are the challenges and lessons learned from developing and implementing a common open data standard globally? What is the role of the tech community and API specialists in such a process? (Read the full session description)

I hope it sounds interesting to people planning to come to the conference! If you haven't planned on coming already, here is some more information about it, copied from the conference website: 

APIs are the glue that keeps modern internet technologies together – be it Mobile Apps, Cloud Computing, Internet of Things, Social Media, Quantified Self or Open Data. The theme for this half-day Nordic APIs conference is “from Private to Public“ and we will talk about how to maximize the value from private internal APIs as well as open public APIs. With great speakers and an full schedule we deliver a lot of valuable information in a short time.

The aim of Nordic APIs is to build a open community that spans the entire region. For this reason, we are offering a handful of free tickets for women. We also also offering subsidize travel to Stockholm because we know that not everyone in this community lives in the capital.

Get your tickets now and join us for our 9th Nordic APIs conference and our 5th event in Sweden.

That's the slogan for the on-going tour Nordic APIs with Andreas from Dopter and Travis from Twobo in the lead. Their intent is to

create a community to bring API developers together to share best practices on all aspects of API development.

Yesterday, @fohlin and I attended the Copenhagen half-day "conference". All talks are (or will be made) available on the Nordic API website. 

Overall I'm impressed with how much content you can squeeze into a half a day. The 25 minute presentations were long enough to convey details, but short enough to not get bored during the less interesting talks. Presentation quality was generally high with @mitraman definitely providing both the most interesting content and with excellent delivery. In his "journey into the terrifying world of hypermedia" he shares some thoughts about why hypermedia is hard and why businesses are not adopting it. 

Although perfectly reasonable, I disagree with the default outset that consumers of APIs are end-user clients. Most, if not all (?), talks assumed the API consumer is some sort of user interface: a mobile app, mobile website, or website. For example, both @mitraman and @madsenevoldsen (who also talked about HATEOAS hypermedia) discussed various levels of implementations of relations between resources where a lot of focus was placed either on 1) the developer using the API to develop a UI, or 2) automatically generated or adaptive UI clients.  

I think we're missing a large, and possibly relevant, discussion about hypermedias place in machine-to-machine APIs. In my current work, which is heavily related to the Internet of Things, consumers of APIs are not necessarily end-user applications. There's an additional level somewhere in between the device (or service) and the client where lower-level functionality is sublimed by additional services. This is not only present in the IoT context. Another example that comes to mind is building, for example, recommendation systems which may operate on data from multiple sources. 

For next time I would like to see the following:

less focus on end-user clients and more about service-to-service, machine-to-service, or machine-to-machine APIs

10 or so years ago it was all about SOAP and WS-*, today it appears to be all about REST. What about Push and streaming APIs?