5 ms·
Ask HN: What's the worst API you've run into?
- BaCtErIaLaMbDa 10y agoboardcast of localhost
- stephenr 10y agoFacebook, far and above anything else. It's unreliable, unstable, poorly documented, and yet every manager wants to use it because hey Facebook are a big company their Api must be great right?
- taspeotis 10y agoNot me personally but this got some traction twice on HN: https://mollyrocket.com/casey/stream_0029.html https://mollyrocket.com/casey/stream_0029.html
- nness 10y agoJira's can be very unwieldy. It is a hard one to google answers for and the Python interface is practically undocumented. It's seems to be often out-performed by the site itself.
- fiftyacorn 10y agoIve been using sports API's for side projects this year and found google-fit api the worst. The problem is that it was conceptually different, based on a timeline, and lower level while the other API's were based on individual sessions
- ysarbabi 10y agoI can't count them!!! but the best one is telegram bot API: https://core.telegram.org/bots/api https://core.telegram.org/bots/api
- drdaeman 10y agoHmmm... Anything enteprisey. I once had to interop with Viacess-Orca RiGHTv IPTV/DRM clusterfuck, and wouldn't recommend anyone to get remotely close. Not just to that, but to anything SOAP. Then, maybe, PayPal's NVP APIs. Quite a mess (although, I guess, I can understand why it's that way), with docs not really covering the fine details, esp. all the possible failures.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jamesmp98 10y ago" Viacess-Orca RiGHTv IPTV/DRM " a what?
- drdaeman 10y agoAn system used for IPTV services by one of ISPs (a large telco) I've worked for. Basically, a giant piece of Java EE that strives to make everyone's life harder. Consumers get all the niceties of DRM, service provides get fun time trying to tie it with their accounting systems (that's what I had to do) and trying to figure out when it breaks, etc.
- africajam 10y agoRETS, (Real Estate Transaction Standard) without a doubt. Its an ancient xml protocol that is still important today but really painful to work with!
- ohyeshedid 10y agoSeconded. To be fair, though, it's often not the API itself but the mapping and strange restrictions tied into access to it. Also, the often missing documentation of what is mapped to where, and why. I'll never touch it again!
- luca_ing 10y agoThe old Microsoft Crypto API (the newer one is better, but still bad) It's been a few years, but from memory: IIRC you could e.g. install new keys, but not quite list them (somehow only almost), and you couldn't remove them again. Amusingly you could also tell the API was developed by three different people, who preferred different API styles (I remember one was fond of callbacks, the others apparently not so much). Reading the documentation was pretty funny because you got pretty good at spotting which functions had been created by Alice, Bob or Charlie. That was the only thing that was fun about it :-)
- Someone 10y agoI guess you mean the API discussed here: http://sethnielson.blogspot.nl/2008/12/repost-playing-around-with-cryptoapi-in.html http://sethnielson.blogspot.nl/2008/12/repost-playing-around... (Badly formatted and code is missing)
- jamesmp98 10y agoI'm not a fan of Steam's API. Mainly, y issue is that it is very limited. I had to use Python and Beautiful Soup to extract the data out of webpages for a project recently
- eb0la 10y agoSNMP (simple network management protocol) Not exactly the best way to control a network device. But it is what we have. Plus, every machine tries to do something different with the non-standard stuff. And different parts of the APIs (called MIBs) from the same vendor follow different reference conventions, so you end up asking a lot of (mostly useless) data to be able to change something from up to down. Avoid it if you can and use something simpler, like sshing to the device.
- sathley 10y agoCSS
- k__ 10y agoSome SOAP GPS API I had to use recently. Didn't know it could take so much code for polling simple data for IDs.
- collyw 10y agoSalesforce is a pain in the arse to deal with. I would be surprised if its the worst, but it makes easy stuff far more difficult than necessary.
- josh_fyi 10y agoPerfectScript from WordPerfect 5
- eb0la 10y agoJust discovered my fist wordprocessor had some kind of scripting inside... ... because you're talking about that Wordperfect 5.0 with blue screen on a text terminal, right? I knew you could do some mail merge stuff, but nothing more. Thanks!
- josh_fyi 10y agoPerfectScript from WordPerfect 5
- cia48621793 10y agoWebRTC: There's simply too much to configure and the modularization is also exaggerated. WinAPI: Because of compatibility some old API procedures with ugly designs have to remain, for example CallWndProc. Bonus: WinAPI is Pascal calling convention based (__stdcall vs __cdecl). Unity Engine: Because pascal case sucks (I consider CamelCase for C# master race). Webpack/Gulp: again the same clause of WebRTC but ‘parenthesized’/‘bracketized’
- potench 10y agoOmniture: eVar7, prop5...? Terrible.
- jetti 10y agoMost market exchanges, more specifically CBOE (Chicago Board Options Exchange). They use FIX Protocol for their API but they don't follow their own spec and so it is just guessing as what they actually want.
- kasey_junk 10y agoIt is sooooooo bad. Lots of exchanges have bad API but CBOE is for sure the worst.
- Can_Not 10y agoI forgot what it was called, but instead of JSON or XML, this HTTP API used: FOO=ABCDEFG|BAR=QWERTYUIOP
- rcavezza 10y agoThe Hubspot API is particularly awful.
- cauterized 10y agoPhabricator's. Weird gaps, missing fields, bizarre unnecessary complexity, incomprehensible structures.
- bbcbasic 10y agoThis was a bit painful to use: http://reaxml.realestate.com.au/docs/reaxml1-xml-format.html http://reaxml.realestate.com.au/docs/reaxml1-xml-format.html Its an xml format for uploading property listings. Came with a dtd but was hard to really fathom out which combinations are valid.
- aprdm 10y agoZabbix. It's really terrible.
- Tempest1981 10y agoOur IT guy used to refer to SMTP as Satanic Mail Transfer Protocol. I think he was joking -- it doesn't look too bad.
- Raed667 10y agoWebRTC: The concepts are pretty straight forward, but getting something to work natively without a wrapper or a commercial service seems near-impossible.
- iamwil 10y agoWhy had no one mentioned Netsuite? Their API really makes things difficult for developers. I hate them so much.