Comments on: Netflix, Philips, and the fragility of APIs

By: sheila

sheila — Fri, 21 Aug 2015 00:00:43 +0000

they still have not fixed the problem… netflix and philips are useless at this point

By: AzraelKans

AzraelKans — Wed, 11 Feb 2015 17:58:36 +0000

Just to let you know this is still an outgoing problem. I just bought this TV unaware of this problem, and Netflix still has loading issues, I cant watch a single complete video, because Netflix will disconnect a few seconds after it starts.

By: David Megginson

David Megginson — Sun, 23 Mar 2014 12:09:42 +0000

In reply to Andrew Doble. Exactly (for REST and industry standards). Standards are really, really hard, so you need a big payoff for the person-decades invested in establishing one, but consumer Internet TV devices may have reached that point.

By: Andrew Doble

Andrew Doble — Sun, 23 Mar 2014 09:57:34 +0000

One pattern used in application integration to handle the n*m interface problem is to use a canonical data model. Basically this means a standardization of at least the data that is passed between the different applications. In a web API context this implies a standardization at an industry level, something that I don’t think is really happening at the moment.
Note that the other problem is a standardization of the operations that can be performed. With a REST style this problem has been somewhat minimized due to a restricted set of operations, i.e. the HTTP verbs.

By: Peter Rushforth

Peter Rushforth — Fri, 21 Mar 2014 02:14:53 +0000

I think the term REST API may best suit that category of API that are provided by the browser, based on the media type, i.e. the DOM and friends.

By: David Megginson

David Megginson — Thu, 20 Mar 2014 16:52:51 +0000

In reply to John Cowan. "Nonsense term" might have been too harsh, but when you have a GET request that returns a CSV, XML, or JSON resource, I believe that the term "API" causes more confusion than clarity, and encourages less-experienced developers to wander into overly-complicated morasses like data binding.

By: David Megginson

David Megginson — Thu, 20 Mar 2014 15:53:43 +0000

In reply to Stephan Schmidt (@codemonkeyism). Thanks for the comment, Stephan. Care to provide any details?

By: Dallas Gutauckis

Dallas Gutauckis — Thu, 20 Mar 2014 15:14:21 +0000

This is why it’s smart of Netflix to be moving in the direction of self-updating clients (HTML clients written in C that load a Netflix URL on each open). This way, you don’t have to deal with TVs or other devices that never get updates. You simply update the page that is loaded to work with the new API.

By: Stephan Schmidt (@codemonkeyism)

Stephan Schmidt (@codemonkeyism) — Thu, 20 Mar 2014 15:04:55 +0000

“the whole point of REST is that it’s not an API (or rather, that its API is HTTP, and most of the semantic burden gets switched from API to payload).”

LOL, this must be the funniest thing yet I’ve read in 2014.

By: John Cowan

John Cowan — Thu, 20 Mar 2014 14:54:30 +0000

One of my jobs at Google was to help product teams to understand that while they could change their web UI at will, they had to have a deprecation policy for their APIs, with lifetimes measured in years, not months or days. Restful API considered harmful: Oh pfffft. All lions are made out of meat, but that doesn't make the phrase stone lion self-contradictory or useless. A RESTful API has some of the properties of an API as a stone lion has some of the properties of a lion, which suffices.