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I was having lunch recently with a few developers, and the topic of "What is the worst API you ever had to work with" came up. The unanimous answer was immedia
by alex_c 14y ago
I was having lunch recently with a few developers, and the topic of "What is the worst API you ever had to work with" came up. The unanimous answer was immediately "Facebook". Everything from the documentation, to multiple ways to do similar things (each of them incompletely documented), to deprecations that never actually go away, to arbitrary breaking changes.
- ceejayoz 14y agoI'd go with Instagram's over Facebook's.
- phillmv 14y agoWhat did you try to do? I've worked with both and Instagram is… pretty straightforward. Granted, I only ever authenticated and consumed feeds, but still. Facebook on the other hand is a maze of twisty little passages, all alike
- ceejayoz 14y agoPain points we've run into: * OAuth redirect_uri is locked to a single domain. No test.example.com/staging.example.com for testing - you need to create a new app for a testing/staging environment. * Max of five apps in an account (see above) - we're having to register an Instagram account per app so we can create dev/test versions of the app. * Can't grant access to other devs for an account. * Access to the commenting API is whitelist based. API gives an e-mail address, which never responds. Trying to use the API returns JSON with a bitly link to a Google form, which also never responds. We've been waiting some time for them to respond with a yay/nay on comment whitelisting. * Docs say you should respect privacy setting of photos, but API doesn't tell you which photos are private anywhere. * The Google Group seems to be a place feedback/bug reports go to die.