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Is SOAP dead?
No. It lost the center of gravity to REST and it is still running in production across most large enterprises. Treating it as merely obsolete is both inaccurate and a mistake.
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History & Landscape 9
Where this all came from — EDI, CORBA, SOAP, the social APIs, ProgrammableWeb — and what the landscape looks like now.
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What can EDI teach us about APIs?
That machine-to-machine commerce is decades older than the web API, that standards plus trading-partner relationships can outlast every fashion, and that the API economy is much earlier in its life than we like to think.
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What happened to ProgrammableWeb, and what does it mean for API directories?
It documented the birth of the API economy, grew to thousands of hand-curated listings, and shut down in 2022 — which tells you that manual curation cannot keep pace and that directories are hard to sustain.
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What is the API economy?
The economic value created and exchanged through APIs. I opened API Evangelist on that idea in 2010 — the comparison being that where businesses in 2000 needed a website, businesses now need an API.
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When did the first web API launch?
Salesforce shipped what is generally considered the first commercial web API on February 7, 2000, followed by eBay in November 2000 and Amazon in July 2002 — though the underlying idea is decades older than that.
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Where did API management come from?
Mashery, Apigee and 3Scale — the original three, all founded in the mid-2000s — invented the category. The layer they built has since unbundled into gateways, portals, catalogs and governance.
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Why hasn't there been another Stripe or Twilio?
Because both took a genuinely painful, regulated domain and made it feel simple — and that is enormously hard, expensive, and slow. Most API startups skip the hard part and ship a thin wrapper.
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Why should I care about the history of APIs?
Because almost every "new" idea in this space is a returning one, and knowing the previous round tells you which problems are genuinely solved and which are about to be rediscovered at expense.