A major part of
this chapter is devoted to studying web sites by analyzing their end-user functionality and
how it can be seen through its URI structure (URL language). In the following sections, I discuss
in greater detail notions of addressability, granularity, transparency, and persistence in URLs.
I will present a detailed listing of entities and how you can refer to them in URIs for Flickr, as
well as a brief analysis of Google Maps, Amazon, and del.icio.us for comparison.
Public APIs and Existing Mashups
Is there a public API for the web site? A web site??™s public API is specifically designed as the official
channel of programmatic access to the data and services of the web site. It essentially lets
you access and program the web site almost like a local object or database. For a slightly more
formal definition of an API, consider the one by John Musser from Programmableweb.com: ???a
set of functions that one computer program makes available to other programs so they can talk
to it directly.???2 Although there are APIs for operating system, applications, and programming
toolkits, this book focuses on the APIs of web sites and web applications.
If there is a public API for a web site, how have people used the API? Looking for what
others have done with the API helps you get right into the application without wading through
any documentation.
What??™s the range of the third-party wrappers available for the API? How many are officially
supported by the web site owners? Which ones were developed by the community?
Are there many people working with the API, or is there little evidence that it is being used
at all? Have any mashups using the web site been developed? How sophisticated are the mashups?
Are they straight-up remixes of the data or presentations of the data in a new context? Do you
see some emergent and unexpected property? Surprising mashups often reveal a capacity in
the formal API or some integration point that might not be obvious from a quick glance at the
documentation.
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