The secondary goal of the HTTP API was to take something that was difficult for programmers to create or have to recreate with various degrees of success and make it easier. Through all of the WordPress community, we should be able to create something that was more bug free than what others were doing themselves. Trust me, some of the bugs were difficult ones and I don’t think any one person could have solved them all with only part-time commitment.
One of the strengths of WordPress is how easy the APIs are. I can wonder about how much time can be saved if there was a Facebook connect API or a Twitter API that everyone that wanted to use those APIs could do so uniformly. If there is a bug, then it is fixed for everyone that used that API. Well, the argument could be made that since there are a small number of developers that would want to use these APIs that it doesn’t justify adding it to the core.
The point is not how many programmers are using it now, because we don’t know how many will in the future, if such, an API existed. It is possible that one programmer might not know it even exists to know to use it or might not like how the API is used to access the web services. I do know that if the choice was to spend at least four hours studying an API, and then another day to three days developing an API, including testing, I’d go with the already written API.
The biggest hurdle will be writing the “easier” API and then the second will be convincing those with commit access that it is worthy to be part of core. I would like for WordPress to instead include the UI to allow others to develop the UI and extend the features. If WordPress moves to a more foundation, then having easy APIs would seriously beat out a lot of the competition that does not and forces the programmers to develop their own or use a third-party library.
Possibly Related Posts:
- Libraries Should Use Liberal Licenses
- Why Writing Documentation Wasn’t a Waste of Time
- Contradiction of Good Object-Oriented Design
- WTF Are People Still Writing PHP Template Engines
- Ripping CodeIgniter a New One, Part 2
Tags: wordpress
I’ve been trying to create a system of plugins just like this for Facebook for some time now. I hadn’t considered it from the “API” angle, but my goal is to basically make it easy to do anything FB related you like with a WordPress site and the right plugin for it.
Anyway, check it out here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-facebook-connect/