Tech-Wanderings of Greg Holsclaw

It is a bit tardy, but last month I attended the Google I/O conference. It was a two day conference where Google was able to showcase many of their open APIs, demonstrate how to use them, as well as having more general fireside talks about the future of HTML and a whole Social track highlighting Open Social, OpenID, and OAuth technologies. Chris DiBona gave his Open Source is Magic talk, which he gave as a keynote speaker at the Boston DrupalCon.

The main reason I am writing is that most of the speakers were mentioning how many installations of a particular API are out on websites, as a testament to how easy it is for developers to use their APIs. The thing that irked me is that many CMSs like Drupal have developed wrappers for their APIs, increasing the pool of potential users beyond developers, to Drupal users.

The Gmap module is a perfect example. This module allows site owners to never touch a line of JavaScript, and yet harness the power of the Google Maps API. The Google Maps API speaker mentioned that there are hundreds of thousands websites, but how many of those sites are using a wrapping like Drupals Gmap module supporting the implementation, versus a direct implementation.

A quick look through the module repository, there are at least two Google API module for Drupal 6 already, and over a dozen modules, not counting YouTube related modules. There are also many Yahoo related APIs that are integrated into modules as well.

I tried to keep this from a rant, and I am so glad that the Drupal community of developers creates these wrappers. But really, where is the respect?