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Web APIs, not Web Services

In Web Services are Dead, Long Live Web Services, Mark Nottingham suggests HTTP Web Services as a better phrase for discussing machine-to-machine communication using HTTP where the WS-* stack isn’t assumed.

I’d go a step further and say that the word “services” is ambiguous and confusing. I’ve met people who think that a Web Service is any application that you access over the Web—and it’s easy to understand their confusion.

I propose Web APIs as a better alternative. They’re APIs that you call over the Web. No Deathstar required.

Update: Joe Gregorio argues against the term API in this presentation from last year.

Posted 26th May 2006 at 9:22 am

This is Web APIs, not Web Services by Simon Willison, posted on 26th May 2006.

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13 comments

  1. S'what I've been calling them at work for ages. That or "XML APIs", but that's because their "Web"-ness is arguable if, er, they're not on the web (but are internal HTTP services). "Web APIs" is a perfectly good name.

    Stuart Langridge - 26th May 2006 09:30 - #

  2. Let's stop this naming madness and just call it 'web'.

    Thijs van der Vossen - 26th May 2006 12:49 - #

  3. Thijs, most people think the web is MSN.com and used to think it was AOL.com. And, of course, most people think internet=web, too.

    Names are useful. You can have to many or too few names. You can consider GET/POST to be dynamically-typed RPCs, but most people think of them as links and documents.

    Jeremy Dunck - 26th May 2006 14:20 - #

  4. Yep, I've not been happy calling them Services for a while now - "Web API" does fit rather well.

    Dan Shepherd - 26th May 2006 14:35 - #

  5. HAPI?

    H(TTP) API?

    Damn. It's taken

    dustym - 26th May 2006 14:58 - #

  6. Quick: grab a trademark on WEB APIs

    Harry Fuecks - 26th May 2006 15:35 - #

  7. And here I've been working to steer people away from the term API:

    http://bitworking.org/projects/XML2005/presentatio n/atom-publishing-protocol.html#slide14

    Joe Gregorio - 26th May 2006 21:20 - #

  8. At this point in time, I think, you won't be able to stop them... everyone's using Web Services (or *WS). A similar thing happened with the terms DHTML, AJAX... I think :-)

    Markus - 27th May 2006 10:47 - #

  9. Joe: well, for Atom, it makes sense to call it a protocol, since that's what it is (protocol: a standard for data / command interchange), but I think when we are talking about the non WS-*, primarily RESTian services being made available, we're usually referring to two things: the functionality/framework that's provided (platform/service) and the interface for those (API).

    I think that in conversation, Web API makes a lot of sense: "we're making this available in Upcoming.org's [Web] API" is actually in fact, how we usually talk about things talk about it already.

    I think there's still the question of what to call the collective/aggregate APIs and environment (it's sort of a platform, but that's already so abused to mean so many things), but that can be a discussion for another day... :)

    Leonard Lin - 28th May 2006 07:56 - #

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    pworm - 29th May 2006 03:48 - #

  11. "Whats there in the name"
    - I guess it was Shakespeare

    As long as these APIs are there, it will be making my life easy.

    Ruturaj K. Vartak - 29th May 2006 05:47 - #

  12. This debate started up in like 1998 when XML-RPC was about to be totally pwn3d, supposedly, by SOAP. For about six weeks in 1999 Microsoft got people to think that unless you had SOAP, you didn't have a Web service, but I don't think that anybody thinks that way anymore, not even Microsoft, which has adopted JSON internally in its Atlas Ajax stack. I am not a fan of "Web API" because I think that acronyms are overused; they're a sign of lazy writing and lazy thinking, but if it works for people, then whatever. If one were going to really rethink this term, something like "Web integration point" would be a good term to consider, since it would subsume RSS (which can act like a programming interface but not always).

    Jeffrey McManus - 6th June 2006 19:21 - #

  13. I like the term Web API. Nice one. API describes it not only as providing an interface, but more specifically that the interface to it is one for programming, as opposed to something like a form interface. It's also a term that's been around for donkey's years, so let's adapt it for web.

    Tim Almond - 21st June 2006 22:46 - #

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