Tearing down walls: Web APIs for desktop applications
Given at PolyConf.Very few desktop apps expose APIs. In part, the use cases are just too obscure to bother with. But in part, building APIs requires us to bridge the web and the desktop, and that’s not very easy. But it can be done. And you can do it too. One of my first jobs at Screenhero was to build an API that allowed Slack to control our desktop application. Journey with me through Screenhero’s API and see how we blended Ruby, Erlang, C, JavaScript, and sheer naïveté, all so you could type /hero into Slack and watch magic happen.