The pay per click search engines have done an excellent job of managing API updates with minimal impact to users. I would love to see the following items deployed by Omniture in the near future.
- Publicly host the WSDL files. This way if you have non-breaking changes that can occur within a point release, we don't need to download a new WSDL into our application. With .NET, we can just point it at the hosted WSDL on your site.
- Version the releases. When Google updates the WSDL to a new version, they leave the old version running for a few months. The publicly hosted WSDL files are in the format of google.com/V15/wsdl or google.com/V16/wsdl. This allows for migration time of applications. All I have to do is modify my app to point to the new WSDL in most cases.
- Host detailed, API specific release notes on this site for each new version.
- Ease up the security! The current implementation requires some advanced changes for .NET developers just to get it going. If security is the concern, I would think Google PPC data is just as confidential, yet their schema is much more cross-platform friendly.
- Provide a public RSS feed with announcements/updates/blog postings. This way we don't have to login here every day to catch when somethings updated.
Awesome....thanks much for
Awesome....thanks much for taking the time to list these out.
You'll see us starting to version the WSDLs in the future.
I get it on the security piece. We'll take a closer look. Given our model and the types of customers to serve, we are more likely to err on the side of a more secure solution, but I want to make sure we're optimized. Thanks for the detailed description of what you're facing.
We have RSS feeds set up separately for each forum topic and for the blog...are you looking for a single RSS feed that provides updates on any segment of the site?
All the best,
Chris