Review of more than 100 developers previously posted here on hacker news, in order to determine what external APIs have been the most difficult to integrate into the project developers. Winner ... or rather loser? Facebook. Refer to the Facebook API developers in the expression after errors, poor documentation, endless API changes, slow response times and other headaches.
Google APIs were in second place, and APIs of Twitter came in third.
Image source: Programmable Web
Of course these three services are the most popular among today's developers, so it's not surprising to hear that they are at the top of the list for the problem. Of course Facebook, Google and Twitter will come in higher than, say, Digg API, which is hardly ever seen in the wild these days.
However, Facebook, which received the most complaints from developers, calling it "broken", bugs and poor offering documentation. Twitter received complaints too, but it is also the most positive comments over any other service. Meanwhile, complaints about Google has APIs that have been closed or are missing.
According to photo aggregation service treasure, which was held in the survey, there were a large number of complaints about the current vendor API. And treasure thinks that developers deserve better:
They no longer serve their developers as well. No bad documentation. There are problems with services like OAuth. APIs arbitrarily changed without warning. And there's nothing even resembling industry standards, just best practices that one finds a way to get around. As developers, we build our livelihood on these APIs, and we deserve better.
Additional data
Other interesting survey results had to do with associations, overhead and detailed information about specific headaches.
For example, almost two thirds of the developers claimed they had 3 or more integration services, and a third said they used between 4 and 6. 9 developers reported that they used 11 or more services.
Surprisingly the developers did not consider that the integration services received year after year, worse that treasure believed would be the case. This may be related to the improvement over time as standardized and commiditized libraries, or perhaps the reviewer admitted bad language in their survey question.
With regard to the headaches? There were quite a few listed, including:
Poor documentationOAuthPoor error handlingLack example codeLack environmentsLack test standard libraries throughout the languagesAPIs that changes/break often (mainly Facebook) normalize data for mapping of internal data structuresLine between using and abuseArbitrary, Regulation (differences between services) Differing standards (rest v v SOAP XML-RPC, XML v JSON (v) post, versioning, v, etc.)For services to talk to the dev machine for firewallTrove said that he will post a new survey in the near future, to ask some of the issues that developers told them that they would like to see next time.Additional sources: Programmable Web
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