Google Data APIs Protocol – interesting move from Google. I (and others) have thought for a while that combining OpenSearch’s read capabilities with the Atom Publishing Protocol’s write capabilities would create a very powerful API, and that’s roughly what Google is doing here.
It’s great to see the OpenSearch support (a bit – they’re using startIndex, totalResults and itemsPerPage), but I’d like to see them using it more. Some of what they’re doing is contrary to how OpenSearch works (that’s not a problem per-say), as they’re using predefined query names such as q and max-results (and a folder for categories) rather that allowing people to use whichever they want and then specify them in an OpenSearch Description file.
In that same vein, it would be nice to see them make use of autodiscovery, as Atom, RSS, OpenSearch, and others do. Upon first inspection I would say these autodiscovered documents could be OpenSearch Descriptions, but I may be wrong about that.
One interesting thing to note is that they mention how startIndex is 1-based (which is true), and then display an example with a value of “0″. Sounds like DeWitt is right, it does need to handle 0-based numbers too; even Google is making that mistake.
DeWitt brings up some other good points as well.
Via Niall.
Update: Joe Gregorio weighs in
Update 2: Marc Canter (one of my favourite bloggers) finds this linkworthy 😉 although I’m always amazed at the spellings my name gets.