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meh... it's all server side stuff. The underlying data is pretty much the same throughout all of those years. They just kept adding on the layers. Should be t
by jordache 9y ago
meh... it's all server side stuff. The underlying data is pretty much the same throughout all of those years. They just kept adding on the layers. Should be trivial for an old client to only consume subset of data that is only relevant to them.
- Grazester 9y agoDoesn't that mean also that they didnt break their api or update it to exclude these older versions? Wouldn't that me an admirable thing?
- eesmith 9y agoIf it's so simple, then why isn't it more common? You say "should be trivial", but in practice that doesn't seem to be the case for most applications. For example, Google Calendar changed their API some years back which caused the calendar display on Samsung refrigerators to fail. Why did that seemingly trivial task of calendar synchronization fail?
- dboreham 9y agoTo preserve compatibility with old clients you have to want to do so. In the case of Calendar Google did not want to do so.
- eesmith 9y agoThen it's not trivial, is it?
- emilfihlman 9y agoIt is trivial. It's literally only about preserving the old api.
- ggggtez 9y agoBut how will you move fast and break things if you spend all your time supporting old api?
- eesmith 9y agoWhich takes us back to my first question: "If it's so simple, then why isn't it more common?"
- CaptSpify 9y agoJust because something is trivial doesn't mean that anyone has to care enough to keep doing it. It's not more common because we as an industry have a terrible habit of designing systems to be non self-maintaining.
- dboreham 9y agoBased on my experience (which admittedly is extensive and has been expensive due to BigNetCo changing their APIs) it isn't more common because there are business reasons behind the changes. There was a reason why some API was dropped and that reason doesn't involve your life being pleasant and rewarding..
- dboreham 9y agoDifficult to know the difficulty of wanting something, no?
- Demiurge 9y agoThe thing is that Google maps is so old and the api is so domain specific, it doesn't need to change. The data required is just maps.google.com/v2/<z>/<x>/<y>.png There are new things like vector tiles with multiple layers of vector data, so we will definitely see more breakage with clients using that. And the routing is response JSON also had a stable layout. It's not hard to continue to support these api because the type of data they send doesn't change. Google also versions, and accounts and charges for the api usage. I wish there was more standardization for calendar data but many calendars, including Google, like to mess with the the underlying data and functionality, and there is not ground truth like xyz to really ground them =)
- mastax 9y agoI suspect the YouTube API is similarly simple. Search to get a lost of video IDs. Look up video ID to get thumbnail, title, description, list of video stream URLs. But they still discontinued the old API and broke all the first-gen smart TVs.
- ramshanker 9y agoYea, I bought a smart Sony LED TV in 2011 with inbuilt Youtube. TV still works excellent, but Sony/Google had to retire the youtube app. Guess it was because it couldn't support Ads?