> I heard someplace recently that APIs are the newest form of vendor 
> lock-in.  What's your take?

If you use a design pattern like MVC on top of the API (assuming you're building a web app on top of the API), then it doesn't have to be a lock-in scenario. It is amazing, though, how much proprietary stuff vendors sneak into so-called standards based web services. No matter what you're doing with the API, you'd probably want to build some sort of abstraction layer on top of it so that it would be easier to swap out if you changed vendors or ditched the vendor all together. That's assuming you could extract your data from the vendor product... ;-)

Rob Fox
Hesburgh Libraries
University of Notre Dame