Martin Pilkington
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I think it would be important to define what APIs we are looking at targeting, as there are various different types. Some are simply to allow integration between applications, whereas some are entire platforms. You have APIs like Facebook, Twitter, PayPal etc which are integration APIs, but then ones like Rails, Django, .Net and Cocoa which are platform APIs. Should these be treated separately and if so, how and why?
There is a major distinction between the two on one key item: versioning. An integration API is often harder to version and change, whereas a platform API can provide a clean break, especially during backwards incompatible changes. You can choose whether to use Rails 2.x or Rails 3.0 for example, but there isn't much choice in something like the Twitter API.
Thanks
Martin