[wladimir]

I agree with the the grandparent that preventing lock-in is important, but I think in addition to the standard you do want to offer some APIs in your service that are specific to the environment you are in (cloud, HTML5). Kind of like AppEngine with their native datastore and Amazon with EBS.

[gpjt]

That's an interesting point. I guess the distinction we want to make is between creating private APIs that would lock people in, and enabling them to use appropriate standards and publicly-available modules. So integrating with (say) WebGL for graphics, or making it easy for people to mount their own EBS volumes or access S3 (we're running on AWS anyway) would be good, whereas insisting that the only way to display plots of data was to call our private API would be bad.

Does that make sense?

[wladimir]

Yes, exactly. I think it makes sense to use standard modules if possible, but use private APIs for functionality that is not in the standard Python.