When Interfacing with a 3rd Party API, What Can Make Things Challenging?

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Some hours back I posted this question on StackExchange site.

I would like to share the question here.
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/85270/when-interfacing-with-a-3rd-party-api-what-can-make-things-challenging[^]

I would like to get some reviews and developers opinions on this question.

My real question is here :) --

Reuse of components in development of software program are always exposed through the API's. Most of the products in today's world (such a facebook, google, .Net, JDK, ...) provide API's to reuse their components without being actually coding from the stratch. Also API's provide a huge high-level abstraction to the under lying components.

My question is about the usability of these API's. Certainly, in all API's there are Obstacles. Obstacles can be

-- skill sets,
-- resources,
-- Documentation of the API's
-- the API itself.

What do the programmers think the real obstacle are? List few of your opinions.

To Question this here: Being a developer I investigated the obstacles when uisng Highcharts. Though I have strong points why Highcharts is great compared to other Javascript visulization libraries I found myself lost with the usability of the charts when going through their API docs at the beginning.
Indeed, their support forum is good to get your questions answered.

Developers uisng API's - most of the time - do not understand the design intents of the API, architecural design and the decisions made during the development of the API.

Also, what will be your suggestions to make better API that will reach to large set of developers?

I'm not entirely sure about the friction of learing new API's.

Posted 19-Jun-11 6:44am

ashwinkumark10

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov · Answer 1 · 2011-06-19T07:49:00

I would say, you should not "investigate the obstacles", you should solve the application problem. You cannot solve "scientific" or "fundamental" problem here, because… there are no such problems, do be serious.

(However, if you really need to investigate the "obstacle" you should go into social studies, not engineering. CodeProject won't help you. You need a representative set of data from many engineers. I would question scientific value of this stuff. :-))

Now, you're making big mistake in your question of comparison API of Facebook, Google, .NET and JDK. This is like comparing a horse with a saddle on another horse. JDK and .NET are horses, everything else… not even saddles.

"Developers uisng API's — most of the time — do not understand the design intents of the API, architecural design and the decisions made during the development of the API." — may be, but why do you call such people developers? Real engineers do understand all of that, always. If you say most of the people who do development are not real engineers, this is a social problem again. The results are usually sorrowful.

Finally, I will try to explain that your question make no sense and are fruitless. If you ask a question to a persona who actually resolved the obstacles, you will typically put this person in a very awkward position, especially if this person is polite. If this person is impolite she or will probably say "Go to hell, I solved all the problems!" because you will make and impression of a person who is not busy with anything serious. A polite person will typically feel the same.

If you ask this question to the one who is still suffering with the obstacle, the answers will be useless. A person who did not solve the problem is not a valid source of information.

A conclusion? Busy yourself with something serious. Sorry if it sounds not very polite. I already use a lot of patience answering this question. This is a real constructive advice, not a rant.

Thank you for understanding.

—SA