Which web interfaces do you like the most or the most popular?

Question

Soap, REST, xmlrpc. Facebook, Twitter, [insert website 2.0]. What is the final web API and which will be most likely for your code and for what reason? It seems that some web APIs cause nausea among developers, while others refer to pure worship. If you were told to develop an API for a website / product that you would emulate (even if that was redundant)?

Answer 1

37signals products have great APIs using RESTful XML-over-HTTP. The documentation is also pretty good.

Answer 2

HTTP

The above primitives are expressive, but common enough to apply to a wide range of problems. The APIs that turn my hair gray are those that make unacceptable assumptions about how I will use them. HTTP doesn’t nicely dictate.

Answer 3

The set of Google GDATA APIs — I use YouTube alone — extends Atom, which is a standard in itself, so development time is also spent learning this RSS-type protocol, which gives it more than other proprietary IMHOs.

Answer 4

The Flickr API is pretty good: http://www.flickr.com/services/api/

Spent several months working with him, and found him quite useful. The documents are also large, and many of them have made it much easier.

REST protocols, JSON / XML / PHP / SOAP, each endpoint has a namespace, many parameters / parameters for each request. Error messages and codes are also documented.

Most of all, it allows you to access all the information about Flickr stores about your photos and users (with the appropriate permissions, of course). Gotta love the good APIs!