I'm very interested whether fellow HNers consider AtomPub a failure? The article points to not so great adaption, but in fact AtomPub has been embraced by some major players—i.e. Google which uses their GData for every one of their dozens APIs[1] and Microsoft which is now pushing OData to be used for .NET based services[2].
It seems AtomPub isn't that terrible idea—you get uniform envelope format, so you can use feeds to represent your data in any way you like, because each entry has its own unique id. AtomPub let you use many conventions that web developers are already familiar with—e.g. <link rel="alt"/>, various extensions like OpenSearch etc.
If you are API author would you consider using AtomPub (or GData/OData)? Do you consider it too difficult/inconvenient to implement?
If you are using any AtomPub (GData/OData) based API what are your experiences? Do you consider it too difficult/inconvenient to consume?
[1] And provides JSON support: directly by translating XML tree as JSON structure (and I was sure they had something called cJSON, but now I can't find reference anywhere so I might have been dreaming that.)
[2] I don't know .NET world that good, so anyone please correct me if I'm wrong.
I think AtomPub suffers from the same problems that SOAP does. It's too complex for what it does, or at least it feels that way. The fact that major player have adopted it doesn't change things, as many major players adopted SOAP.
I don't think it (or SOAP) will just vanish though, it just isn't having the impact its creators had hoped it would.
I'm surprised that perception would exist. It's really a shame if that's (in addition to JSON hype[1]) what has killed Atom.
The main difference between SOAP and Atom is that I can explain the latter to anyone in 5 minutes. Actually that's what some Google engineers have exactly done and you can find the results on YouTube.
And there's plenty of XML APIs and JSON APIs and each one of that APIs reinvents the concepts of feeds and entries, because those concepts are very natural.
Anyway, I understand that AtomPub just isn't very popular[2], but I was interested in any technical difficulties that may arise for both services providers and consumers. That is, if I were to implement API for NextBigThing and were to implement AtomPub-based API, could that be a problem for anyone?
Well, I guess it's a shame I haven't had a chance to get this discussion going while this story was still on the front page…
[1] Which went from "XML is too complex, fuck it; Let's just dump our internal data structures and be done with it" to "Oh, now I understand what that schema thing is supposed to do; it's kinda neat. Let's just re-implement it in JSON."
[2] Actually it seems extremely anti-popular if you just go to ProgrammableWeb and filter several thousand APIs by protocol; there's only one page of results!
It seems AtomPub isn't that terrible idea—you get uniform envelope format, so you can use feeds to represent your data in any way you like, because each entry has its own unique id. AtomPub let you use many conventions that web developers are already familiar with—e.g. <link rel="alt"/>, various extensions like OpenSearch etc.
If you are API author would you consider using AtomPub (or GData/OData)? Do you consider it too difficult/inconvenient to implement?
If you are using any AtomPub (GData/OData) based API what are your experiences? Do you consider it too difficult/inconvenient to consume?
[1] And provides JSON support: directly by translating XML tree as JSON structure (and I was sure they had something called cJSON, but now I can't find reference anywhere so I might have been dreaming that.)
[2] I don't know .NET world that good, so anyone please correct me if I'm wrong.