[Lazarus] Google APIs

Michael Van Canneyt michael at freepascal.org
Fri May 8 10:30:00 CEST 2015



On Fri, 8 May 2015, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:

> Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
>> Hello,
>> 
>> Some of you may have noticed that a package 'Google APis' has been added to 
>> FPC in subversion.
>> These contain the Google APIs as generated from the Google Discovery 
>> Service (~70 APIS).
>> 
>> I am of the opinion that such Web APIs have meanwhile the same importance 
>> as the native APIS that make up the desktop; the world is increasingly 
>> connected to Internet, and Google, MS Office365 apis (and many others) will 
>> become more and more part of the toolset of a programmer.
>
> Are these really APIs, i.e. an interface between an application program and a 
> local library, or are they actually communication protocols?
>
> https://xkcd.com/1481/ applies.

This is a sterile distinction. It is the only way to communicate with Google.
it is, for all practical purposes, the API.

They also call it the API, for good reason.

> Perhaps FPC/Lazarus, which is already a large project, should package things 
> which take a URI as a parameter and return HTML/XML/JSON etc. separately.

No. For me, this is at the same level as the Win32 headers or Mac OS headers.

Whether there is a protocol involved or not is irrelevant for me. 
It's about making functionality available.

>
> Also there's the risk that Google will change or discontinue a service 
> arbitrarily. They don't exactly have a good record in that area.

This is web programming. Things change fast. I am aware of this.
The files are generated using a tool, and the tool is also in SVN.

Michael.




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