Platform API is 主播大秀 Future Media鈥檚 new Salford based team.
Our mission is to make life easier for application and website developers who work with the 主播大秀鈥檚 content, and to accelerate innovation in our online products. Platform API power all the 主播大秀s product areas 鈥� 主播大秀 iPlayer, News, Sport, Weather, Children鈥檚, Knowledge & Learning 鈥� as well as many external & partner products such as and Youview.
I鈥檓 in charge of the team and I鈥檓 looking for new people to join us. So I thought I鈥檇 give you more details about what Platform API will be doing.
We鈥檝e got most of the 主播大秀's content available on our API 鈥� TV & programmes, & articles, , as well as covering syndication of the content to the 主播大秀's business partners.
The 主播大秀 has been developing HTTP APIs for many years, but they鈥檝e evolved independently and organically with the apps and websites (鈥減roducts鈥�) that use them most, and this has lead to them being far from consistent 鈥� we have quite a variety of approaches in syntax, semantics, aesthetics, documentation & access models. They鈥檙e also often incomplete 鈥� we typically implement just enough to support the functionality needed by our products at that point in time.
The lack of consistency and completeness doesn鈥檛 make life easy for our product developers 鈥� whether they work for the 主播大秀, our business partners or small independent development agencies or enthusiasts.
Platform API is going to change this. We鈥檙e going to evolve the APIs to be more consistent by using the best approaches across them all, by reducing the unnecessary differences and by working harder to make them more complete. This way, they鈥檒l be easier to learn and use for the product developers, and more useful to the products that use them next.
Being responsible for this refreshed set of internal & public APIs will lead to many interesting technical and API design problems for the engineering teams to solve. Across our content set, there are varied sources with many thousands of new items published every day, and our APIs have to be able to respond to a large variety of aggregations and filtering requests from many different sites & apps. We have to discover and expose the relationships between our content items and relationships to external concepts (like places or people). And our APIs have to do this in real time at huge scale. We definitely have some hard data processing and manipulation problems to solve, as you can see below.
We鈥檝e been enthusiasts for years. We are rapidly adopting practices and cloud technologies to help us scale, reduce coupling and develop more efficiently. We work extensively with cutting edge technologies such as RDF triple stores, NoSQL, Scala and Xquery as well as more traditional technologies like Java and SQL.
If you鈥檝e got a passion for APIs, are interested in offering resilient services at scale and you have API design, database, product management or engineering skills then I鈥檇 like to hear from you.聽 on the 主播大秀 Careers website.
And if you鈥檙e a regular reader of the Internet blog, expect more posts from the team as it sets about its work.
Jon Billings is Head of Platform API, 主播大秀 Future Media