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by mercurial 4985 days ago
I think it's worthwhile pointing out that the article specifically deals with web APIs.

Regarding the content, I'm puzzled as to why versioning a web API should be a hard problem when you can just include the version number in the URL. Sure, you need to maintain this code path forever afterwards, but that's true of any platform with ambitions of backward compatibility.
1 comments
prateekdayal 4985 days ago
One issue is that many services deprecate API endpoints over time. For example - https://github.com/blog/1160-github-api-v2-end-of-life
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mercurial 4985 days ago
Like I was saying, it depends on how much backward-compatible your vendor wants to be. I just don't see how a hosted app is going to protect you from this kind of thing. The only difference is that the hosted app is presented with a "native" API as opposed to an RPC API, but it's just as vulnerable to deprecation, and will remain so as long as you are a third-party.

Except that the cost in term of infrastructure and ongoing maintenance (code review, etc) is higher, which IMHO makes it likely to be phased out sooner than a web API.

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