ReadWriteWeb

LinkedIn announced today its LinkedIn Groups API, available in JavaScript or REST flavors. The new API will enable developers to embed functionality from Groups into other applications.

As an example, Microsoft used the API to embed discussions from LinkedIn on the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2011 event website.

SOAP is dead. No it's not. SOAP is undead.

And the undead still inhabit the enterprise... in a big way.

I'm at Gluecon, the kind of event where passionate developers gather. These are people who for the most part never use SOAP. They work with REST - undoubtedly the king of all APIs.

Microsoft Research and Bing are sponsoring a contest called the Speller Challenge. The goal: create a spell checker that delivers "the most plausible spelling alternatives for each search query" and deliver the service over a RESTful API. The first prize is $10,000. Registration opens on January 17th 2011.

Web frameworks, lead by the rise of Ruby on Rails, have been a hot topic in development for the past few years. Is it possible for them to be on the way to extinction already? A post on the blog of web development company Recursivity asks whether serverside web frameworks are becoming irrelevant. It's probably premature to ask whether it's already happening. But I think it's reasonable to ask whether they could be irrelevant and what it would take to make that happen.

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When publishing an API, there are two preparatory steps to take before jumping into implementation. First, create metrics for determining the success of your effort. Secondly, take a good look at what you already have so that you can find out what you need to do before you publish.