Ewan's been looking back to the Apple Newton and forward to Thursday's Apple tablet launch, using these as markers to chart the growth of information sharing in the wider smartphone world. Soup was the past, APIs are the future, he reckons!
Read on in the full article.
API"s have been around for a long time, well before Web Services became popular. They had a different name them, just Interface, without the Application Programmer in front of it.
Modern API's expose less of the underlying storage mechanisms, whether these are flat files or structured databases, and that makes them more suitable for systems with multiple storage systems, on-device or in the cloud (the modern name of the mainframe 😉) This lack of exposure is probably the result of programmers becoming better at designing such interfaces through experience.
I've been wondering just how useful it would be in a modern operating system
Arguably, CouchDB has some similarity with Newton's Soups (a lot differences as well - but as a loosely structured datastore CouchDB is at least reminiscent of Soups). The Ubuntu folk have launched the DesktopCouch project which, as the name suggests, effectively makes a CouchDB datastore part of the OS.
The use cases for DesktopCouch are remarkably similar to Soups - sharing contact data between applications, sharing notepad data between applications, etc.
Of course, the big difference between a soup and cloud or client APIs is extensibility. The example Ewan gives of linking stuff together in the soup either doesn't work with an API or requires a lot of extra stuff.
Mash-ups generally manage this by layering another database on top of the databases of the source data.
Of course, the benefits of APIs over a soup is that the API providers can focus on their speciality, and distribution, security and backup is handled on an as needs basis, rather than needing incredibly sophisticated solutions in the soup.
What's really been interesting about this phase of the Internet is that the browser is becoming less important and the API and centralized data and services has gained prominence.
Think about it. For the last 15 years, you had to deploy your apps through a browser. Now, we have all kinds of emerging platforms that have screens. As a service provider like Twitter, they build the service, store the content locally, then expose it via an API, allowing thousands of developers to build out unique applications that we find useful... in turn, adding value for Twitter.
I can see Twitter on their website, I can run Adobe Air apps like Tweetdeck, run native S60 app, browse on my S60, ditto my iPhone, then my XBOX360... these are all platforms with screens. HDTV is emerging rapidly. Kiosks coming back. Now the iPad.
As a tech company, you can't afford to innovate on all of these platforms. But you can build an API and open innovation around you... for your benefit and consumer benefit.
Remarkable times indeed.
what does this mean???
how it can interest us???
where is the benefit???
is this my fault???
why???
so many qustions ,sorry.