Self-identified issues with API candidates

In the Face-to-Face meeting held in Paris (May 4-5, 2015), Working Group members presented sample code illustrating how they might develop for selected user stories.

After those presentations (which were very interesting!), presenters self-identified issues in their own API. Here are the issues, as captured on a whiteboard during the session:

IndieWeb (presented by Aaron Parecki (note that he was the only IndieWeb participant at this F2F))

(Includes: Webmention, Micropub, PubSubHub, Microformats)

Still needed:

• Propagating state changes of objects (likes how AS does this)
• Namespacing command parameters and form encoders work, but anticipate limitations

Chris Webber: likes the wide variety of IndieWeb implementations

ActivityPump (presented by Jessica Tallon, Evan Prodromou, and Chris Webber)

• cannot get source of content
• cannot upload multiple files
• targeting is on "activity" rather than on "object"
• multiple steps to upload 1 file
• uses little-known "http notify" verb (note that people are willing to drop this)
• should be finer detail on exactly what happens when you unfollow, like, etc...
• harder to come up-to-speed (than the IndieWeb stuff), because ActivityPump is one huge spec

SoLiD (presented by Henry Story, Andrei Sambra, Melvin Carvalho)

• needs a better community (such as IndieWeb has)
• LDP is harder to implement
• need a lot of Javascript and RDF libraries on client-side
• lack of notification mechanism
• less focused on "social" at its foundation, and therefore harder to implement the social user stories
• perceived steeper learning curve for those who are used to developing with APIs (perhaps large companies can devote the time and resources, but doubts not enough will)
• more flexible for wide variety of situations
• compared to IndieWeb / AS / ActivityPump, SoLiD is less well-established for social, therefore SoLiD looks rudimentary
• certain parts of SoLiD spec don't apply to social stuff; maybe should be extracted