Keynote: Andrew Nacin

by Andrew Nacin @ APIStrat 2014 in Chicago

Transcript

1. #apistrat
2. Hi, I’m @nacin, a lead developer of WordPress.
3. WordPress aims to democratize publishing.
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14. Top U.S. Newspapers by Print Circulation 1. The Wall Street Journal 2. The New York Times 3. USA Today 4. Los Angeles Times 5. New York Daily News 6. New York Post 7. The Washington Post 8. Chicago Sun-Times 9. The Denver Post 10. Chicago Tribune
15. Top U.S. Newspapers by Print Circulation 1. The Wall Street Journal 2. The New York Times 3. USA Today 4. Los Angeles Times 5. New York Daily News 6. New York Post 7. The Washington Post 8. Chicago Sun-Times 9. The Denver Post 10. Chicago Tribune
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29. more than 60 million sites run WordPress
30. 23.1 percent of the top 10 million sites run WordPress — W3Techs, Sept. 25
31. ubiquity
32. Everyone loves to hate on PHP, but it’s everywhere, and that’s what we like.
33. We’re backwards compatible even across major releases, which means we’re stuck with anything we do.
34. The most difficult aspect of our job is building the best experience for users.
35. The WordPress dashboard
36. Single page applications
37. Mobile apps
38. WordPress is increasingly used to build web apps
39. WordPress as a content management interface
40. Consuming published content and structured data
41. We’re more than 12 years late on the ‘API first’ thing.
42. But now we need an API
43. But now we need an API
44. ‘an API’
45. It’s not an API. It’s a distributed platform for serving extensible APIs.
46. WordPress is a platform for content
47. WordPress is a platform for developers
48. WordPress is a platform for APIs
49. One in four sites run the same software. Massive potential here.
50. Building an API for everyone is about as hard as it sounds.
51. our qualities
52. Flexibility
53. Be able to use the API to build cool stuff.
54. Performance
55. Efficiency, without real say in the server or environment.
56. Extensibility
57. Any plugin can change how the API works.
58. New content types, new relationships, new things to discover …
59. Discoverability
60. So, like, hypermedia, but in practice.
61. User Experience
62. OAuth app registration is the DMV of the internet.
63. Portability
64. Every site is its own little house on its own crappy shared hosting island.
65. Can’t rely on SSL, which means no OAuth 2.
66. Can’t even rely on the server to understand HTTP verbs.
67. Centrality
68. Can’t just deploy a bug fix.
69. Each site is its own API, its own URL, its own version, its own plugins.
70. Compatibility
71. Different sites could run different versions, to say nothing of plugins.
72. Quality
73. We’re “flooding the market”
74. Responsibility
75. With great scale comes with great responsibility to not screw it up for everyone.
76. some of our solutions
77. OAuth 1a doesn’t need SSL. Portability
78. ?_method=PUT ?_method=DELETE Portability
79. Pass-thru API URLs on WordPress.com, WordPress.org? Centrality
80. JSON HAL for discoverability. Discoverability
81. Official client libraries - work around pain points - graceful compatibility - ensures discoverability Interoperability
82. Plugins have their own namespace, with their own version. 1.0/posts my-plugin/2.0/books Portability
83. Maybe we can deploy bug fixes with auto updates. Stability
84. We are taking the time to do this right. The plugin is version 1.0 and will always be backwards compatible. You can use it now and give feedback. Quality
85. Wired & The New York Times are already using it.
86. If we do this right, we can help make APIs more mainstream. Responsibility
87. WordPress has been a gateway drug for many thousands of web developers.
88. Is WordPress the next gateway drug for APIs?
89. @nacin nacin@wordpress.org wp–api.org make.wordpress.org