From the Labs -- MetaCarta Labs Weblog

I’m looking at various API references on the web, and curious as to whether people have favorite sites to go to for documentation for a service. Do you like how Google’s APIs Site is done? Or maybe you prefer Flickr’s more interactive developer tools?

I’m hoping to take the lessons from these sites and use them to help improve the design of the developers website. I’m told it’s a bit scary to non-developers at the moment, though I’m not sure that’s beyond the realm of expectation for a developers site. We’re scary people sometimes.

That said, I want to take the things that exist on other sites that people enjoy, and make them happen with the MetaCarta Developers site as well — so I’d love to hear any thoughts people have on creating a developer resource that’s both reasonably friendly and complete, and also useful.

Some examples I’ve come up with so far for comparison:

• Yahoo’s Developer Network
• Apple Developer Connection
• OpenCalais Web API
• Flickr API
• NPR API
• Twitter API
• Facebook Developers Site

Would love to hear of more, and your favorites.

New Developer Documentation website: MetaCarta Developers. This site has all kinds of information about the APIs and interfaces for MetaCarta’s products, so if you want to know more about how to use the OnDemand GeoTagger, you can go ahead and grab the OnDemand Web Services Guide as well as the MetaCarta Web Services guide, and see all the API information you could need, including information about how to authenticate, parameters to send in, etc.

Improving the documentation available for OnDemand has been on my todo list for a long time, and this is the first step in that direction. If you have any feedback about this setup, I’d love to hear it!

And of course, this isn’t just for OnDemand — as you’ll no doubt see when you explore the site, this content also applies to people developing against MetaCarta’s appliance products. In the future, we’ll be adding more to this site — like a gallery (a la the OpenLayers Gallery) and sharing more sample code and applications with you.