Google has released a new API discovery service that will allow developers to query the plethora of Google APIs out there.
You may wonder, what is the point of an API that lets you query a list of other APIs. Well the intention here is to make it much simpler to create developer tools for using Google APIs.
Google recently released the API Explorer that allowed developers to play around with Google’s APIs online before writing code based on them. This tool also used the Google Discovery API, and it itself has been open-sourced now to serve as an example of how to use Google’s new Discovery APIs. The discovery API itself is also listed in Google API Explorer!
Besides being a directory of all Google APIs, the Discovery service also allows one to retrieve details of a particular API, which will present a detailed description of the APi including “inline documentation of methods, parameters, and available parameter values.”
IDEs (and IDE plug-ins) that take advantage of this API will be able to offer support for the latest Google APIs by simply querying them, without requiring updates simply because Google added a new API.
Google has also announced another new API, this time for Page Speed. Google’s Page Speed browser add-ons, and their recently released online Page Speed site are designed to take a website apart and look at the causes of inefficiencies. It can point out places for optimization based on how much performance gain can be expected.
Now Google has released an API for Page Speed that will allow companies to integrate speed testing into their own tools. The WordPress plugin W3 Total Cache already uses the PageSpeed API to give performance information to WordPress users.