01 Jan 2014 / Venture Beat – Developers have enough to do as they attempt to make their companies’ applications stand out in app stores and even in the world of enterprise software. If they want to add complex features users will dig, like a tool for handling payments in the Bitcoin virtual currency, they can tap external services.
No wonder application programming interfaces (APIs), which provide access to data and tools, relating to Bitcoin grabbed lots of attention this year on the API-tracking site ProgrammableWeb.
Readers cruising the site have gravitated toward five categories of APIs more than any others. In addition to Bitcoin, translation, stocks, movies, and streaming APIs came out on top. That’s according to a year-end analysis the company released late last week.
It’s not a coincidence that such categories are getting more attention. These services can require massive amounts of computing power. Companies that don’t specialize in Bitcoin mining, for instance, can’t be bothered to deploy massive IT resources if they seek to make a bit of the virtual money on the side. So APIs become a viable option.
Working with movies and stocks, too, can mean tapping lots of historical data and crunching numbers quickly across many physical machines. Movies, stocks, and streaming, writes ProgrammableWeb’s Eric Carter, “require massive sacle when it comes to data consumption and exceptional processing capabilities to keep an industry edge. APIs address both scalability and speed … .”….. Read more
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