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Web API Sites

April 23rd, 2008

Flickr: 704 API Calls per Second

code.flickr.com As announced on the Flickr Blog, Flickr has launched a new website for developers: Flickr Code. And besides announcing the new site they’ve both a) given interesting details on just how much API traffic they do each day (see below), and b) they announced they’re open sourcing Flickr Uploadr, the cross-platform (Windows and OS X) desktop tool for uploading photos to Flickr.

New at Flickr Code, you can find:

Uploadr is built on on Mozilla’s XUL Runner. Now that Uploadr is open source, developers can customize and extend its functionality. Maybe you will want to apply specific effects (such as watermarking) to your photos before uploading them. More radically, perhaps Uploadr can be transformed to be a full-function desktop UI to Flickr, to become a Viewr and Downloadr all in one. Maybe developers will extend the Flickr Uploadr to talk to sites other than Flickr. The potential is there for all this development.

How to get started with hacking Uploadr? A good starting point is Flickr Uploadr, start to finish now to learn about the challenges of developing cross-platform apps using XULRunner. Check out the video interview with developer Rob Crowley to get an in-depth story. You can also join the discussion at the Flickr Group Hacking Uploadr.

Even though the open source Uploadr is the big announcement coming from code.flickr.com, don’t miss the fascinating glimpse that the announcement provides into the tremendous buzz continuing around the venerable Flickr API (which you may know as the 2nd most mashed up API listed in ProgrammableWeb with 329 Flickr mashups listed):

In the last week we deployed new code to Flickr 50 times, including 546 changes by 16 people. We issued over 2,000 new API keys, and third party developers made an average of 704 API calls per second, across 109 public API methods. We added 1 new API method, and updated 7 others. There are approximately 10,000 lines of open source code in our public subversion repository.

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Posted by Raymond Yee as Code, Metrics, Yahoo, photo at 1:10 AM | 2 Comments »

January 28th, 2008

Get It In Gears

Tony Ruscoe of Google Blogoscoped reports that Google Gears alert messages indicates that support for Gears offline access to Google Docs is forthcoming. As Tony notes, the “the only official Google integration is for Google Reader (although evidence that offline functionality is coming to Google Calendar has also been spotted).”

As you can see in our launch coverage last May and our Google Gears API profile, Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline. Essentially it’s a mini-database and server with synchronization of online and offline tasks. The official site describes Gears as “an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline. Gears provides three key features: A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing to contact a server. A database, to store and access data from within the browser. A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background.”

Here’s one example from our mashup directory, the personal finance site Buxfer that lets you auto-sync your banks and credit cards but also uses Google Gears to let you store your personal finance data locally in a Gears database instead of a remote server.

Google has representative examples that show off the synchronization and coding model. The Google Gears blog has examples like the application suite Zoho, along with an offline editor for Blogger. On the Salesforce.com developer site there is an extensive tutorial for using Gears to access account data. And here’s a mashup example with Gears and the Digg API that can capture Digg stories for offline viewing.

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Posted by John Musser as Code, Google, JavaScript at 10:49 PM | No Comments »

January 24th, 2008

Use Bury Recorder To Watch Digg Buries

Another interesting mashup added to our listings recently is the Digg Bury Recorder which is built on top of data pulled from Digg Spy. For a bit of the why and how, creator David Hurth at Ajaxonomy gives this introduction:

If you have been using the popular service Digg you know that it is very easy to submit a story and to see it start to gain traction just to be buried into the dark abyss. What I find particularly frustrating is that you don’t know how many people buried the story and the reason for the bury. If you have seen Digg Spy you have noticed that the application does show buries, but you can’t just track data for a particular story.

In this case you give the application the story’s URL and click “Watch for buries”. An Ajax UI automatically refreshes to give a dynamic history of all buries for a given story. In the background the server code fetches and parses JSON data from Digg Spy every 20 seconds to get the updates. One added bonus with this application is that it’s open source so you can download the code, see how it works, and if so inclined create and host your version.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Code, Social at 12:43 AM | No Comments »

December 19th, 2007

OpenSocial Shindig Released

If you are interested in hosting OpenSocial compatible widgets in your web site you’ll probably want to keep an eye on the open source project Shindig. What is it? As Google product manager Dan Peterson describes in Let’s get this shindig started: “Shindig is a new project in the Apache Software Foundation’s incubator (as per the formal proposal) that aims to provide an open source reference implementation of the entire OpenSocial stack — Shindig’s goal is to allow new sites to start hosting social apps in well under an hour’s worth of work.” This source “is based upon code that has been powering Google Gadgets and iGoogle for the past few years and is meant to bootstrap the Shindig project.”

It’s a multi-part project and this first commit includes code for the first two of the four components below:

Gadget Container JavaScript — core JavaScript foundation for general gadget functionality (read more about gadget functionality). This JavaScript manages security, communication, UI layout, and feature extensions, such as the OpenSocial API.
Gadget Server — an open source version of gmodules.com, which is used to render the gadget xml into JavaScript and HTML for the container to expose via the container JavaScript.

OpenSocial Container JavaScript — JavaScript environment that sits on top of the Gadget Container JS and provides OpenSocial specific functionality (profiles, friends, activities).
OpenSocial Gateway Server — an open source implementation of the server interface to container-specific information, including the OpenSocial REST APIs, with clear extension points so others can connect it to their own backends.

This initial release has not yet been tested for “production-level traffic” but can help folks get started. If or how you use this also depends on your team’s skillset: “While the initial contribution of the Gadget Server was written in Java, Shindig is language neutral. Ning is planning to contribute an initial version of a PHP Gadget Server, and we’ve heard rumors of C#, Perl, and Ruby.”

With Facebook now licensing their code and Google working to foster a community around OpenSocial and Shindig it looks like news in the social API space won’t be slowing down anytime soon.

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