![]() …or they could punt: Let Zapier, et al., deal with the headache of maintaining bidirectional interfaces with thousands of systems, and concentrate their integration efforts on providing a useful and robust API, to allow integration services to make as efficient use of Airtable as possible. Quite possibly you would reach a point where development resources that should be going to maintain and enhance the core product would instead be spent on maintaining an interface to a handful of sites used by a handful of customers. An Airtable-provided integration front-end would either have to be extremely agile - in the old-school sense - to be flexible enough to handle all contingencies, or it would risk not supporting an important subset of sites. Each system with an API has its own eccentricities: Maximum calls per second, maximum requests per call segmenting of large responses blocking and flow control error recovery and the like. And while an API gets you 80% of the way there, it only gets you 80%. Could Airtable write its own? Quite possibly - but they are database experts, not integration experts. …or Integromat, or any of the other countless SaaS integrators. If you want to bypass using a SaaS service, you can write the necessary code to shuffle data from one site to the other and back: That’s why APIs were invented, after all.ĭoes Airtable have its own JSON or XML gateway, one that allows you to format outgoing requests, receive responses, break down the responses in a structured manner, and store the resulting values in Airtable records? Sure! It’s called Zapier. But, like all APIs, it’s designed for a programmatic interface. There is a way to get that information into Airtable: It’s called the Airtable API. Well, the OMDB API provides you that data in either JSON or XML format any structured presentation is the work of the browser or browser extension. However, building a simple interface between Airtable and another supported site - and I’ve integrated with a number of Google services, the US Postal Service, and others - is typically less than an hour’s work the first time around. ![]() ![]() I’ve never tried to integrate with IMDB, so I don’t know which services support that end-point. Most work the same way: By providing pre-packaged endpoint integrations - for instance, to Airtable on one end and IMDB on the other, with both linked to a common data abstraction in the middle - and then allowing you to pass data through the central abstract data layer in the middle so as to complete the circuit. Each has its own constellation of strengths and weaknesses: price, UI/UX, number of canned integrations, quality of documentation, polling cycle, and the like. Two of the ones most frequently mentioned here are Zapier and Integromat - but if you wanted, you could spend the rest of 2019 doing nothing but evaluating competing options. There is a rich environment of SaaS integration services out there. ![]()
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