APIs.io Design Doc
The idea behind APIs.io started by a rant from @ChrisMatthieu stating that @Apigee wouldn’t list his 3 REST APIs on their Provider page even though he had been speaking with them for nearly 6 months and all three APIs worked in their API Explorer. Apigee seems to reserve space on their API Provider page for paying customers.
The following individuals immediately responded with support for this idea: @guyht @kritikal @k0ws1k and @SandFoxUK. Within 1 hour from the initial tweet, we created the @Apisio twitter handle and a public repo on Github (http://github.com/apisio). An idea becomes reality...
What we need is an open source and free API registry service that allows developers to publish and discover REST APIs and interact with them online. I am thinking that this service would work like a mashup of the following services:
Programmable Web - Directory of REST APIs allowing developers to discover and rate APIs and list mashups using them.
Apigee / HURL - API Explorer for interacting with REST APIs. Saving requests and responses to share with other developers.
API Configurator (new service) - Apigee uses WADL files to define an API’s behavior. We should also support WADL files but add a UI for defining APIs online with the ability to export WADL files. (Interesting project: http://tomayac.de/rest-describe/latest/RestDescribe.html)
Developed using Node.JS and hosted on Nodester. This will allow us to handle a large volume of transactions for rate limiting and analytics. We could possibly use Backbone.js to create a very responsive UX with websockets for streaming live API metrics.
Here's an interesting API server slide deck that I came across today: http://paul.querna.org/slides/api-servers-in-nodejs/#1