http://ianloic.com/2010/01/26/flipy/ from Ian McKellar Thu, 19 Apr 2012 18:53:18 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 http://ianloic.com/2010/01/26/flipy/comment-page-1/#comment-1814 Ian McKellar Sat, 30 Jan 2010 13:57:26 +0000 http://ianloic.com/?p=185#comment-1814 Automatic binding never seems to give native-feeling interfaces. Look at SWIG or any of the SOAP (ie: WDSL) libraries. I haven't played with the Google Protocol Buffer stuff but I bet that binding one language (eg: Java) to another (eg: Python) won't give you a natural feeling API. What I found was that it didn't take much work to map the conventions of the Flickr API onto the conventions of Python programming. It took a few opinionated decisions and then some implementation. The core code to do the binding is less than 100 lines. The rest is just fluff and tests. Of course this only works because Flickr's APIs are relatively well designed and internally consistent. Automatic binding never seems to give native-feeling interfaces. Look at SWIG or any of the SOAP (ie: WDSL) libraries. I haven’t played with the Google Protocol Buffer stuff but I bet that binding one language (eg: Java) to another (eg: Python) won’t give you a natural feeling API. What I found was that it didn’t take much work to map the conventions of the Flickr API onto the conventions of Python programming. It took a few opinionated decisions and then some implementation. The core code to do the binding is less than 100 lines. The rest is just fluff and tests. Of course this only works because Flickr’s APIs are relatively well designed and internally consistent.

]]> http://ianloic.com/2010/01/26/flipy/comment-page-1/#comment-1808 Grahame Wed, 27 Jan 2010 09:21:06 +0000 http://ianloic.com/?p=185#comment-1808 It'd be nice if these higher-level APIs could be generated from one of the web service description languages. WSDL looks pretty lame to me; Google's protocol buffer stuff has a quite nice high-level language for describing messages. I wonder.. It’d be nice if these higher-level APIs could be generated from one of the web service description languages. WSDL looks pretty lame to me; Google’s protocol buffer stuff has a quite nice high-level language for describing messages. I wonder..

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