The Best Web APIs: The Developers’ Choice

One can toss many companies into the circle of “Web platform providers.” Yahoo!. Microsoft (MSN). Google. They’re all part of the group. Many more are classifiable as such, too. Amazon is a platform provider. As is eBay. PayPal, existing for many years under the tutelage of eBay, even gets to hold the title itself. The list is expansive; the names mentioned here are only the most prominent of the bunch.

Why do we mention these companies? Because apparently a researcher by the name of Evans Data has published the results to a survey, one in which they questioned developers as to which of the most prominent platforms they most enjoyed developing upon. The top pick may come as quite a surprise.

Understandably, many might have presumptions that either Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo! must’ve clearly claimed gold.

Google can seemingly do no wrong, and with its steady stream of innovations and the expansion of projects in its Labs department one could logically presume that the company was most preferred by the development community. But one would be wrong to presume such a conclusion.

Alright, so then Yahoo! must have a shot at the top spot. It’s frequently catalogued as the most trafficked portal on the Web. Its APIs must indeed be lavished with attention, right? Sure, but just not enough, according to the survey results.

Microsoft. It’s gotta be Microsoft. The MSDN is huge. It’s purportedly the biggest software development community in the world. There must be enough spillover from the network put its MSN APIs over the top. Alas, there is not.

So who do we have left? Amazon, PayPal, and eBay. Well, it turns out that eBay of all Internet establishments has been designated the most preferred platform provider. Yes, eBay. The most preferred. Despite suffering “the most outages and downtime” of any of the survey’s picks, it nabs the crown thanks to its having created “well-crafted application programming interfaces (APIs).” Developers are also said to have considerable “financial incentive” to develop on eBay’s platform(s).

There you have it. eBay.

It’s important to note that the auction giant is showing no signs of stopping its push for more development inside and outside the company. Next week it hosts a developer conference in Boston, at which it intends to release a beta of the San Dimas project, “a desktop version of the eBay application written using Adobe’s Apollo platform.”

Profy spoke of the original unveiling of San Dimas in mid-April.