What features should be in the API of a Q&A forum?

answered 2012-11-03 13:11:52 -0500

todofixthis
1092 ● 17 ● 18 ● 37
http://www.fiveyearsabroa...

I would like to see something to fetch the n most recently-updated questions.

answered 2012-11-05 03:31:07 -0500

pajju
563 ● 9 ● 10 ● 22
http://ninjaas.com/

updated 2012-11-07 15:27:30 -0500

Different Users, communities have different API requirements, in the way they want to expose their resources. So there can never be a 'one fit all' solution from askbot side. Also an askbot site that runs askbot will have lots of Rich Data overtime, which can be monetized by exposing a solid RESTful API. And only the Askbot site owners will best know - what to and what NOT to expose, to other developers and partners.

So in my view, the API for Askbot, should be very loosely coupled, like a managed API server. It is good, if the design pattern encourages such things. If you think as a network engineer, a managed API also serves as a load balancer to a larger extent, intelligently cache same requests (doing things like memcached for API requests). This will not slow down and affect the Site APP server anytime.

We need all such good design patterns for the API and this is a huge topic to debate. We might also need things like Webhooks.

Please see all the managed API companies - APIgee, emergentone.com and Heroku's managed api's to setup an externally managed API. They do API management for any DB. In short - they give and manage an API server for your APP. So its super easy to expose, control (authorize, manage resource access control) and also scale your API server on more requests. Do check in detail the services they all offer, you will appreciate my points of view.