Honestly, that's what most web API's are. You are just pushing data around. The "hard" part is that everyone has their own opinions on how it should be formatted.
And of course the minor inconvenience of having to give the user a way to make data entry easy, convenient and consistent.
But deep down it's all spreadsheets. The faster you can wrap your head around that the easier programming is for you.
Spreadsheets are a UI view of tabular structured data with terrible kludges to fake hashes, with no real support for tree structures and heterogenous data structure hierarchies. And if the API you're using is complex, namespaced XML because vendors, UI tends to obscure more than help.
Postman and the like are expensive intermediate abstractions between you and the underlying calls that I find a hindrance. For end users, forms can help, but even then you have to choose between something so generalized to effectively be a DSL like the old XForms spec or else build separate bespoke forms for each use case.
From a programmers perspective it takes a grand total of 2 minutes to do a bash/python script or jupyter notebook that exposes a semantically adequate interface. Maybe 5 minutes, if instead of just doing something quick and dirty yourself you decide to get into an argument with an LLM.
I once had to do maintenance on a system that used an actual spreadsheet instead of APIs. It would load an excel file as a template, add data to certain cells and then save it as a new excel file.
16 Comments
bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de · 31 pts · 137d
Honestly, that's what most web API's are. You are just pushing data around. The "hard" part is that everyone has their own opinions on how it should be formatted.
And of course the minor inconvenience of having to give the user a way to make data entry easy, convenient and consistent.
But deep down it's all spreadsheets. The faster you can wrap your head around that the easier programming is for you.
ICastFist@programming.dev · 2 pts · 136d
Lua figured that out back in '93, their main data structure is the table
DataElemental@programming.dev · 1 pts · 122d
Spreadsheets are a UI view of tabular structured data with terrible kludges to fake hashes, with no real support for tree structures and heterogenous data structure hierarchies. And if the API you're using is complex, namespaced XML because vendors, UI tends to obscure more than help.
Postman and the like are expensive intermediate abstractions between you and the underlying calls that I find a hindrance. For end users, forms can help, but even then you have to choose between something so generalized to effectively be a DSL like the old XForms spec or else build separate bespoke forms for each use case.
dhruv3006@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 137d
but from a programmers perspective - shouldn't it feel natural - you just keep filling up forms doing the same work again and again?
ViatorOmnium@piefed.social · 13 pts · 137d
From a programmers perspective it takes a grand total of 2 minutes to do a bash/python script or jupyter notebook that exposes a semantically adequate interface. Maybe 5 minutes, if instead of just doing something quick and dirty yourself you decide to get into an argument with an LLM.
bestboyfriendintheworld@sh.itjust.works · 6 pts · 137d
What do you mean by natural? Do you want stateful APIs?
RustyNova@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 137d
Oh no.
I already hate apis that requires tokens. It's awful to use manually
eneff@discuss.tchncs.de · 4 pts · 137d
Why the fuck would you use an API manually?
RustyNova@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 136d
In development. You may want to test the endpoint using curl or something like that
bestboyfriendintheworld@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 135d
Scripts and aliases make this easy to set up.
kSPvhmTOlwvMd7Y7E@programming.dev · 18 pts · 137d
I have no idea what that means
Liketearsinrain@lemmy.ml · 13 pts · 137d
4am@lemmy.zip · 9 pts · 137d
Yup: https://lemmy.world/post/44194196
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 135d
oh cool. I've been looking for a postman alternative.
as long as it's not slop I'll check it out.
TrickDacy@lemmy.world · 17 pts · 137d
Then what should they feel like? I don't really know what you're actually trying to say with the spreadsheet comment to begin with.
Fifrok@discuss.tchncs.de · 13 pts · 137d
just use curl
Hudell@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 135d
I once had to do maintenance on a system that used an actual spreadsheet instead of APIs. It would load an excel file as a template, add data to certain cells and then save it as a new excel file.