> Few of us want to be making manual HTTP calls out to APIs anymore. These days a great SDK, not a great API, is a hallmark, and maybe even a necessity, of a world class development experience.
I'm of the opposite mind. A simple API that I can just call with Fetch is far better than having to learn most SDKs. Stripe's Node.js SDK is fairly clean/without headaches, but I look at stuff like the AWS JS SDK and want to gouge my eyes out.
At least with an HTTP API, there's some modicum of standardization. SDKs are and will always be the wild west. The only exception with this that I see frequently is authentication. Some are simple Authorization headers w/ a Bearer <Token>, others (like PayPal the last time I implemented it) require an undocumented base64 encoding of the token.
I'm of the opposite mind. A simple API that I can just call with Fetch is far better than having to learn most SDKs. Stripe's Node.js SDK is fairly clean/without headaches, but I look at stuff like the AWS JS SDK and want to gouge my eyes out.
At least with an HTTP API, there's some modicum of standardization. SDKs are and will always be the wild west. The only exception with this that I see frequently is authentication. Some are simple Authorization headers w/ a Bearer <Token>, others (like PayPal the last time I implemented it) require an undocumented base64 encoding of the token.