Creating a Rich API

by Evan Stein @ Apistrat NYC (Feb. 2013)

Transcript

1. CREATING A RICH API Evan Stein Decibel Music Systems
2. INTRODUCTION TO DECIBEL Swan Song for the CD, incomplete transition  Move to information-based products  Fact-based approach  Machine-based navigation  You never know what people will want to know  Support for non-pop music  Global commerce  Support for music fanatics (who miss the sleeve notes)
3. TECHNICAL DETAILS  Huge metadata store  All information on sleeve notes, as information  Knowledge of music, artists, recordings, geography ….  Search technology with associations  Multi-lingual output  Identifiers to accompany music files
8. IMDB FOR MUSIC (IN PROGRESS)
9. IPAD APP BY CLIENT
10. CHALLENGES  Most APIs have few functions  Highly-normalized: the need for speed  Application of “topics” to subjects, without repeating logic (e.g., genre)  Highly-developed object model, which taxes web services  Adapting data concepts to hierarchical XML
11. SOLUTIONS  Flexible model, data warehousing concepts  Experimentation with graph models  Query-by-example, with brings back the right amount of data  2-step searching, with the concept of “retrieval depth”  Metadata caching  Custom XML models
12. QUERY-BY-EXAMPLE
13. REMAINING CHALLENGES  Network speed still limits object size: result sets can be large  SOAP API has automatic documentation (WSDL), but REST (which most people prefer) does not.  Simplicity at request time is a nightmare at result time  Need for extensive documentation and programming examples
14. GET IN TOUCH Evan Stein Decibel Music Systems 81 Rivington Street London EC2A 3AY United Kingdom +44 20 3657 9760 / US (646) 688 5649 Evan.Stein@decibel.net