US + international: +1-212-796-6890
SE + international: +46-21-480-0920
Business hours 3 am-11:30 am EST (Mon-Fri).
Looks like the tide of the web API protocol war (if there ever was one) has shifted firmly in REST’s favor while SOAP has been forced back. Web developers have cast their votes, they want RESTful APIs.
Here is the distribution of the different API protocols and styles, comparing the situation in 2008 versus that of 2010, based on ProgrammableWeb’s directory of more than 2,000 web APIs.
Last week, Gmail failed – for the third time in recent months. Yet again, the media and blogosphere declared the end of hosted services, software-as-a-service and cloud computing as we know it.
Here’s why I disagree:
(Read on to get cloud computing expert Guy Rosen’s take on how the latest Gmail problems relate to the viability of cloud computing in general.)
Sooner or later, every site or application will fail. However the consequences depend not only on how the failure is managed but also on how it is communicated. Recently the web hosting company Media Temple and even Google have well illustrated how hard it is for modern connected organizations to respond quickly enough to system outages. Here’s a suggested crisis checklist and notes on the difficulties of always practicing it.
It’s a common scenario: A new website launches after having built up a lot of hype around its service or product, only to almost immediately crash due to overwhelming traffic. These launch troubles are almost always scalability-related.
We see this happening a lot. It may sound like a luxury problem (wow, too many users!), but think about it: If you’ve created something special and spent lots of effort building up expectations and buzz around your product, you don’t want anything to stand in the way of people finally trying it out, do you?
Here are some real-world launch troubles from 2008, and advice on how to avoid these kinds of problems.
Elliott Bäck has created a really cool Pingdom plugin for WordPress. The plugin displays your uptime for the last 30 days directly in your blog’s sidebar. From the announcement: WP Pingdom brings the power of Pingdom’s automatic site monitoring to your WordPress blog, allowing you to include your uptime statistics on your blog in textual [...]
John Musser’s excellent Web 2.0 resource Programmable Web (with 1,452 mashups listed!) has included the Pingdom API system tray alerter among its Best New Mashups. The Pingdom API allows anyone with a Pingdom account to access all of his/her uptime monitoring data. We previously dedicated a full blog entry to the Windows system tray alerter [...]
The first application based on the Pingdom Web service API has been released. It’s an open-source Windows .NET application, developed by a Pingdom user, that shows up as an icon in the system tray (that one with all the icons down to your right). It shows the status of any Pingdom checks selected by the [...]
Pingdom’s Web service is currently the featured API at Programmable Web, an excellent resource covering all aspects of Web services and mash-up applications. The Pingdom Web service API allows our customers to access all their monitoring data from Pingdom, for example the latest downtimes of their servers or websites, historical data, response times, raw check [...]
Pingdom has opened up the gates for programmer creativity. No matter how many features we or anyone else have, there will always be something that at least one user wants that isn’t there. There will always be special needs. We decided that we didn’t want to limit any of our customers, and have therefore given [...]
