API Changes

I decided to read the eBay API Developer Newsletter today and was reminded why this API can be difficult to work with. The reason is not because it is complex or difficult to master. It is because the API is constantly evolving (good), and often the evolutionary changes cause previous working code to fail (not good).

After glancing past the Developer Success Stories I found this valuable nugget:

The eBay API team is considering changing the case of the appinfo tags found in various wsdls—specifically, changing from upper to lowercase on the first letter only. For example, CallName could become callName, RequiredInput could become requiredInput, and MaxLength could become maxLength.

In stark contrast, a quote from the home page of rubyonrails.org:

Ruby on Rails is an open source web framework that's optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity. It lets you write beautiful code by favoring convention over configuration.

Can an API be designed in such a way as to make programmers Happy and Productive?

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