Don’s $100 API challenge

by on March 20, 2006

Back when I was an MVP product groups would bring us into a room and hand us some cash and say “spend this on the features you want” and have us look at a board with hundreds of features where we’d pin the cash on the features that we thought were most important.

Here Don Box takes this technique to XML/HTTP/REST APIs.

It’s a good way to focus a discussion onto what is really important to prioritize in terms of spending developer time on.

  • Dive, you are very good theme.
  • Innocent Bystander
    Lets get a non-xml simple text messaging format. Something that can be parsed in about 20 lines of C.

    SOAP blows.

    XMLRPC is so-so - but xml is still to heavy.

    This is why 80% of developers favor REST interfaces, because they're simple (but limited - URLS have a max length limit that prevents passing complex structures as arguments).
  • Troller
    Dave...you're an idiot.
  • Over on the Virtual Earth blog, we do something quite similar and it has had major positive impact on our website! of course, we don't have Don's big budget, so you can only spend 10 bux ;-) it's not too late to buy your features for our next major release here: http://spaces.msn.com/virtualearth/blog/cns!2BB...
  • Dave
    Don Box. There's a name that brings back memories.... so since he's joined MS some 2-3... 4? years ago... exactly what things HAS he done that has seen the light of day Robert?

    Or is this yet another "wait until next year" thing?

    To be continued in your following post....
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