"API" entries

Masking the complexity of the machine

The industrial Internet will bring abstraction and modularity to the physical world.

The Internet has thrived on abstraction and modularity. Web services hide their complexity behind APIs and standardized protocols, and these clean interfaces make it easy to turn them into modules of larger systems that can take advantage of the most intelligent solution to each of many problems.

The Internet revolutionized the software-software interface; the industrial Internet will revolutionize the software-machine interface and, in doing so, will make machines more accessible. I’m using “access” very broadly here — interfaces will make machines accessible to innovators who aren’t necessarily experts in physical machinery, in the same way that the Google Maps API makes interactive mapping an accessible feature to developers who aren’t expert cartographers and front-end developers. And better access for people who write software means wider applications for those machines.

I’ve recently encountered a couple of widely different examples that illustrate this idea. These come from very different places — an aerospace manufacturer that has built strong linkages between airplanes and software, and an advanced enthusiast who has built new controllers for a pair of industrial robots — but they both involve the development of interfaces that make machines accessible. Read more…

The many sides to shipping a great software project

An interview with Shipping Greatness author Chris Vander Mey.

Chris Vander Mey, CEO of Scaled Recognition, and author of a new O’Reilly book, Shipping Greatness, lays out in this video some of the deep lessons he learned during his years working on some very high-impact and high-priority projects at Google and Amazon.

Chris takes a very expansive view of project management, stressing the crucial decisions and attitudes that leaders need to take at every stage from the team’s initial mission statement through the design, coding, and testing to the ultimate launch. By merging technical, organizational, and cultural issues, he unravels some of the magic that makes projects successful.

Read more…

End of a fishing expedition

The result of the Oracle-Google case blocks an inappropriate extension of copyright.

As the Oracle v Google trial shows, we get proper rulings on copyrights and patents when judges and jurors understand the technology they're ruling on.

Top Stories: March 19-23, 2012

Google Maps alternatives, inside Dart, and the upside of offline.

This week on O'Reilly: StreetEasy's Sebastian Delmont explained why his team left Google Maps behind, we looked at the ins and outs of the Dart programming platform, and Jim Stogdill considered the alternatives to always-on living.

Four short links: 22 March 2012

Four short links: 22 March 2012

Watercolor Maps, Inside Displays, Numbers API, and Chinese Mobile Activations Boom

  1. Stamen Watercolour Maps — I saw a preview of this a week or two ago and was in awe. It is truly the most beautiful thing I’ve seen a computer do. It’s not just a clever hack, it’s art. Genius. And they’re CC-licensed.
  2. Screens Up Close — gorgeous microscope pictures of screens, showing how great the iPad’s retina display is.
  3. Numbers API — CUTE! Visit it, even if you’re not a math head, it’s fun.
  4. China Now Leads the World in New iOS and Android Device Activations (Flurry) — interesting claim, but the graphs make me question their data. Why have device activations in the US plummeted in January and February even as Chinese activations grew? Is this an artifact of collection or is it real?
Four short links: 15 March 2012

Four short links: 15 March 2012

Javascript STM, HTML5 Game Mashup, BerkeleyDB Architecture, and API Ontologies

  1. atomize.jsa distributed Software Transactional Memory implementation in Javascript.
  2. mari0 — not only a great demonstration of what’s possible in web games, but also a clever mashup of Mario and Portal.
  3. Lessons From BerkeleyDB — chapter on BerkeleyDB’s design, architecture, and development philosophy from Architecture of Open Source Applications. (via Pete Warden)
  4. An API Ontology I currently see most real-world deployed APIs fit into a few different categories. All have their pros and cons, and it’s important to see how they relate to one other.

Profile of the Data Journalist: The API Architect

Jacob Harris is building APIs and data into elections coverage at the New York Times.

To learn more about the people who are redefining the practice computer-assisted reporting, in some cases, building the newsroom stack for the 21st century, Radar conducted a series of email interviews with data journalists during the 2012 NICAR Conference.

Six API predictions for 2012

In the year to come, APIs will continue to transform into core business tools.

Among the key API trends to watch in 2012: enterprise APIs will go mainstream, data-centric APIs will become common, and APIs will need to be optimized for mobile apps and developers.

Top Stories: November 21-25, 2011

The danger of SOPA, lessons from a Starbucks social experiment, and why the real world is writable.

This week on O'Reilly: Alex Howard explored the implications of SOPA and PROTECT IP, Jonathan Stark looked back on his Starbucks card experiment, and Terry Jones explained how APIs can help publishers.

Four short links: 16 September 2011

Four short links: 16 September 2011

Gamification Critique, Google+ API, Time Series Visualization, and SQL on Map-Reduce

  1. A Quick Buck by Copy and Paste — scorching review of O’Reilly’s Gamification by Design title. tl;dr: reviewer, he does not love. Tim responded on Google Plus. Also on the gamification wtfront, Mozilla Open Badges. It talks about establishing a part of online identity, but to me it feels a little like a Mozilla Open Gradients project would: cargocult-confusing the surface for the substance.
  2. Google + API Launched — first piece of a Google + API is released. It provides read-only programmatic access to people, posts, checkins, and shares. Activities are retrieved as triples of (subject, verb, object), which is semweb cute and ticks the social object box, but is unlikely in present form to reverse Declining numbers of users.
  3. Cube — open source time-series visualization software from Square, built on MongoDB, Node, and Redis. As Artur Bergman noted, the bigger news might be that Square is using MongoDB (known meh).
  4. Tenzing — an SQL implementation on top of Map/Reduce. Tenzing supports a mostly complete SQL implementation (with several extensions) combined with several key characteristics such as heterogeneity, high performance, scalability, reliability, metadata awareness, low latency, support for columnar storage and structured data, and easy extensibility. Tenzing is currently used internally at Google by 1000+ employees and serves 10000+ queries per day over 1.5 petabytes of compressed data. In this paper, we describe the architecture and implementation of Tenzing, and present benchmarks of typical analytical queries. (via Raphaël Valyi)