Web APIs Continue to Multiply
March 20th, 2008 (8:00am) Mike Gunderloy 2 Comments
It was a good day for web workers who build applications. On the one hand, Google released their Visualization API, which provides sophisticated ways to display tabular data with relatively little coding. On the other hand, we have the launch of the Amazon Fulfillment Web Service, which allows anyone to use Amazon’s network of fulfillment centers and packers to ship physical products to their customers.
Taken together these – and other APIs that are already out there, from Google Charts to Amazon S3 and ECC – are making it increasingly possible to build complex real-world web applications without supercoders. But there’s a threat, too: the more services you depend on, the more points of failure you have, as demonstrated by last month’s Amazon S3 Outage. If you’re writing Web applications, have you started depending on all these new APIs? Or are you still keeping as much processing as you can in-house where you can be responsible for your own fate?
2 Comments Post your own comment
Rajeev says: March 20th, 2008 8:40am
Web sercices are really cool but for their reliability issues, maybe if there is a paid premium service then 99.99999 uptime can be guranteed to serious business users.
http://tekno-world.blogspot.com
order fulfillment says: March 21st, 2008 12:26am
Mike. I’m with Shipwire.
I thought you may like to also see a competitor to amazon’s fulfillment.
http://www.shipwire.com
Just a thought. If you want to dip your toes into outsourced order fulfillment, just send a small % of your inventory and they use the service when you get backed up at your home/office.
Our API’s have been exposed and tested for quite a while.
Many shopping carts have already connected. also, integrations with PayPal buy now buttons, eBay auctions, Google Checkout and Quickbooks.
We built a Free Trial to make it easy. No credit card needed to connect and try the warehouse.
http://www.shipwire.com/trial
Multiple warehouses in Los Angeles, Chicago, Vancouver, Toronto and UK (beta).
Ship from multiple warehouses means faster delivery and much lower shipping prices.
We built a widget to demonstrate this. Go to Shipwire.com/pricing and hover over the orange Tag at “DHL”. Input your current ship from location and see how much you would save. Then see if you get 1-2 day delivery for the price of ground if you use the full warehouse network.
We build the free trial to be used, so please do try it.
cheers,
Nate