cast your bread upon the waters

how to make SOAP4R read WSDL files?

Here at Google, we’re about to start offering an API to our search-engine, so that people can programmatically use Google through a clean and clearly defined interface, rather than have to resort to parsing HTML.

This little message “inspired more than two dozen implementations and 10,000 developers sign up in the first week alone,” according to Sam Ruby.

This contrasts sharply with the position adopted at my last startup: the prevailing wisdom there was to give nothing away, share nothing. Messages in newsgroups and mailing lists that revealed nothing more than the fact we existed, no details about technology or implementation, were considerered a Bad Idea. I can only imagine what the result of an aggressive effort tto publicize an API might have yielded.