It’s what you don’t see about the emerging Web that has everyone excited these days. Namely, it’s the powerful application programming interfaces, or APIs. APIs are nothing new and have been traditionally cryptic and difficult to use. However, the advent of Web services along with the notion of mashups has changed the way we consider and leverage APIs going forward.
What changed? In short, the emergence of API consumers, including service-oriented architecture (SOA), browsers that support rich client features such as AJAX, and the notion and popularity of mashups.
