Making an accessible API

We’ve been consumers of APIs from many vendors and projects, and so we have opinions on how things ought to work in an API. An API should be:

• powerful and comprehensive
• concise and easy to learn
• documented
• usable with the minimum of external dependencies
• stable

Then there’s the difference between a “wire protocol” to a web service and how you interact with a web service from within a programming language. Each programming language comes along with its own “style” – Ruby is heavily OO, PHP is a bit more workmanlike, VB is … well, VB.

Today we’ve published a set of PHP bindings for the API on github. You can now CRUD (“Create, Read, Update and Delete”) your objects in efficient batches in Workbooks from PHP and, better yet, there is accessible documentation and it’s released under the MIT license.

Please, go forth and innovate…..!