API? Ha! In my day, we didn't have APIs. I started by scraping stock quotes off of web pages, with a daily-updating script of search-macros. They couldn't change their page fast enough to avoid NetProphet!
Before you cast stones, consider this all started as a side-project, we merged with Stockpoint after they noticed our scraping and arranged a meeting.
Anyway, with APIs it would seem useful to have an 'API watchdog' automated product that alerts when an API changes behavior. Similar to our watchdog for webpage changes when our scraping would fail. Or server-down watchdogs. etc.
I still do this kind of thing, and literally thirty minutes ago logged back on to an old server to fix the scraping script to deal with some bad data on the origin website.
It's quite pleasing when it works, and a hell of a lot easier to deal with as you just read the web page and scrape away.
I think when web pages become more clearly marked up we'll start seeing less and less of the API mess we've got ourselves into. If the websites did what we would hope they would, there wouldn't be a great need for a RESTful aspect of them.
Before you cast stones, consider this all started as a side-project, we merged with Stockpoint after they noticed our scraping and arranged a meeting.
Anyway, with APIs it would seem useful to have an 'API watchdog' automated product that alerts when an API changes behavior. Similar to our watchdog for webpage changes when our scraping would fail. Or server-down watchdogs. etc.