Ben Werdmuller

Tag: open stack

  • The Open Stack and truly open APIs

    The following is an expanded version of the short talk I gave in Oxford yesterday. My original slides follow the transcript. There’s a new kind of web development afoot, which marries old-school object-orientated programming techniques with the distributed power of the web. Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are published sets of instructions for programmatically querying or […]

  • The mechanics of "open"

    Since we started Elgg, I’ve always kept a very open philosophy about how the software should work. From the human perspective, we wanted it to be as inclusive as possible, with an easy-to-use interface and innards that allowed you to do very technical things (like, in Elgg 0.x, republishing aggregated RSS) with very little knowhow. […]

  • User control on the open web

    Data portability and the open data movement (“the open web” for simplicity’s sake) revolve around the idea that you should be able to take your data from one service to another without restriction, as well as control who gets to see it and how. Very simply, it’s your data, so you should have the ability […]

  • Implementing open standards is too hard

    [..] the plain truth is this: it’s empirically way too painful still for first-time OAuth developers to get their code working, and despite the fact that OAuth is a standard, the empirical “it-just-works-rate” is way too low. Joseph Smarr: Implementing OAuth is still too hard… but it doesn’t have to be. This isn’t just true […]