One thing that's been nice about the popularity trend concerning APIs, is that it's made is so much easier for programmers to prevent NIH syndrome. Things used to be a lot more difficult so developing large things in-house <i>seemed</i> more defensible. And we suffered for it...<p>Not too many years ago, it was <i>much</i> more difficult to find quality, pre-built software. Github did not exist. <i>Some</i> APIs were available, but they were generally complicated or miles of WSDL files to get anything done. Implementing one of them was difficult! You could head to the search engines and rummage through all sorts of libraries, package managers, paid sites, SourceForge, and so on. Finding packages that were not only up to date, but functional, <i>and</i> able to run on your OS and version, was more of a chore than it is now.<p>These days, anyone who is paying attention to trends in startups or software would scoff at the thought of having to implement complicated server-side software for payment gateways.<p>And why shouldn't they? There are <i>excellent</i> services available that do not require knowledge of software to implement! If you can craft an HTTP request in your language of choice, you're off to the races! Database design? Storage? Encryption? OOP? MVC? TDD? Who cares? Since you <i>don't have to write or install software</i> you are up and operational with builtin scalability and functionality in: possibly minutes.<p>Awesome.
Is it a good thing though? APIs are centralized and brittle. Sometimes an API makes sense, sometimes I'd rather buy a program or library that I'm sure won't change or go away.
This is true of the startup universe, but businesses at large will- for the foreseeable future- want software that just works. In the rest of the world, businesses that don't want to be technical are developing their own solutions because the solutions they're using now suck.
I do love the idea of an API-centred Lego-ish software assembly approach, but imagining a future when my entire app solely consists of calls to API's (maybe 100's of them), I worry a bit about wait times due to serial blocking calls (and failover generally), and dependency management at a business level (how do I track when one of them goes out of business or is having some downtime). I guess there will have to be a big industry out of wrapping and managing lower level API's in higher level abstractions (just as we see infrastructure businesses built on Amazon).
Exactly, API are definitely the future. Many companies want to integrate products into their own software or solutions. API are easily allowing people to do that. Lob.com sounds awesome, and the prices are really good!