New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Why do companies typically provide APIs but not clients or specs?
Ask HN: Why do companies typically provide APIs but not clients or specs?
2 by whitfieldsdad | 3 comments on Hacker News.
I've noticed that the bulk of my time as a software developer these days is spent reverse engineering third-party REST APIs that don't already have a publicly available API client or publicly available API specification (e.g. OpenAPI). Why don't more companies publish either a specification for their API or an API client on a website like GitHub? For small shops with a few engineers, this makes sense, but for companies that we're paying > $100,000/yr. for access to their APIs, it seems like they should also provide an API client for interacting with it - or at the very least, API documentation. What are the main barriers preventing more companies from releasing either a specification for their APIs or an API client? Are APIs easier to reverse engineer these days, and therefore it's not really necessary to release a client or specification? On the other hand, maybe writing a full-fledged API client is an anti-pattern, since callers could simply implement the functionality that they need rather than implementing all of the functionality that they think that they MIGHT need while still reverse engineering the API?
2 by whitfieldsdad | 3 comments on Hacker News.
I've noticed that the bulk of my time as a software developer these days is spent reverse engineering third-party REST APIs that don't already have a publicly available API client or publicly available API specification (e.g. OpenAPI). Why don't more companies publish either a specification for their API or an API client on a website like GitHub? For small shops with a few engineers, this makes sense, but for companies that we're paying > $100,000/yr. for access to their APIs, it seems like they should also provide an API client for interacting with it - or at the very least, API documentation. What are the main barriers preventing more companies from releasing either a specification for their APIs or an API client? Are APIs easier to reverse engineer these days, and therefore it's not really necessary to release a client or specification? On the other hand, maybe writing a full-fledged API client is an anti-pattern, since callers could simply implement the functionality that they need rather than implementing all of the functionality that they think that they MIGHT need while still reverse engineering the API?
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