On APIs and Documentation (a Slight Rant)
November 19, 2013Yesterday, most of my day was spent fighting with different image provider APIs. Imgur’s API is pretty good, Tumblr’s isn’t bad, but then I moved onto Flickr’s. I spent more time than I care to admit trying to get it into a pretty JSON format that Jackson would play nicely with.
Flickr decided to make the default return type JSONP, which is all well and good… if I wanted JSONP or my parser would recognize it.
It wasn’t until after I had gotten more than just a little frustrated did I happen to stumble on this post about a hidden parameter in Flickr’s API that removes the callback, returning true JSON.
Now, this feature should exist, and it should be well-documented.
I do like that Flickr’s API has a ton of formats, request and response styles, supports REST, SOAP, you name it, they have it. Except clear documentation on how to get true JSON instead of JSONP returned. Arg.
