Requirements for APIs
To open the discussion about requirements
for APIs, an inventory was presented encompassing
complaints about the functionality of the Web,
observations concerning its 'nature',
general requirements for open systems development,
a wish-list of desired behavioral characteristics
and potential (technological) answers.
- Complaints
- lack of referential integrity
- undetected failures
- no control over Quality of Service
- Observations
- dynamic quality of services
- complex interaction
- Requirements
- uniformity, openness, flexibility,
orthogonality, layered, platform-independent
- Behavior
- reliable, configurable, monitoring, notification,
triggering, thread-safe
- Answers
- object-oriented, components, virtual APIs, callbacks, plug-ins
slide: Requirements for APIs
It was observed by Mark Brown that requirements could
not be stated without an explicit indication of
a perspective, that is the kind of application
for which the API is intended.
In contrast, the [W3Creference] library makes no such distinction,
but tries to provide a platform for a variety of applications.