| A few comments: > valuable service I'd think that what makes a good api should be characterized independently of what makes a good service. You can have a useless service, with a fantastic api. No one is going to use it, maybe, but the api itself can still be objectively seen as being good. > Design I agree with most of the points, although I'd say that the single most important part of the design is ease of use. I'm not a professional software engineer, so I don't have a good appreciation for the other elements. > Documentation Now that is the most important part for me. I recently had to use the API of a service I won't name. It was a disaster. The API was documented, but the documentation was basically unreadable and confusing. It took me a long time to figure out how to work with it. A good documentation, with extensive examples can save the user an awful lot of troubles Addenda: I have two other considerations, somewhat unrelated: - The last API I had to deal with use OAuth. I assume that there's a module or package for it in most languages. But this is the kind of thing you want to check, because if your language of choice doesn't have it, then good luck implementing it.. (rule number one of cryptography: don't write cryptography code yourself). I'm sure there are other examples of tiny details like this that make certain languages harder to use. - Support for JSON is usually appreciated (by me anyways). Edit: Fixed typo (without->with) |
The "valuable service point" struck me now. I'll refactor that section on the blog soon.