Miles dropped me a email today with a link he found via Tim Bray on Google's closure of their SOAP search API. Quoderat basiclly says Web 2.0 is underthreat if other companies follow Google's change of mind about their open search API.
Forget about the SOAP vs. REST debate for a second, since most of the world doesn’t care. Google’s search API let you send a search query to Google from your web site’s backend, get the results, then do anything you want with them: show them on your web page, mash them up with data from other sites, etc. The replacement, Google AJAX API, forces you to hand over part of your web page to Google so that Google can display the search box and show the
results the way they want (with a few token user configuration options), just as people do with Google AdSense ads or YouTube videos. Other than screen scraping, like in the bad old days, there’s no way for you to process the search results programmatically — you just have to let Google display them as a black box (so to speak) somewhere on your
page.
Good reasoning and hadn't really thought about it like that before. He then goes off about Widget instead of API's
An AJAX interface like this is a great thing for a lot of users, from bloggers to small web site operators, because it allows them to add search to their sites with a few lines of JavaScript and markup and no real coding at all; however, the gate has slammed shut and the data is once again locked away outside the reach of anyone who wanted to do anything else.
I think there's some parallels between Flash and native files. For most people the Flash files are fine to watch, but for those wanting to take it one step further (say a remix). Flash is a pain in the ass. Its possible but you end up transcoding flash into something useable. In the Widgets and Open API's side of the table, Widgets are good enough for most people but they limit whats possible like for others.
Data APIs are not going to disappear, of course. AJAX widgets don’t allow mash-ups, and some sites have user bases including many developers who rely on being able to combine data from different sources
Lets hope no momentum is lost in the open API field because of Google. One of my arguments for open api's in pipelines is because if you don't do it your competition will. I wonder how many people will switch over to Yahoo's Search API now? I certainly would
Technorati Tags: ajax, google, javascript, openapi, rest, search, soap, web2.0, widgets
