All posts tagged ‘APIs’

File Under: APIs, Programming, Web Apps, Web Services
Mar
8
2011

Thousand of APIs Paint a Bright Future for the Web

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ProgrammableWeb's stat for API protocols and data formats

Once a novel idea that seemed limited to Flickr, the web-based API is now everywhere you turn — Twitter, Foursquare, Google Maps and thousands of other sites offer up their data in the form of an API.

APIs mean that third-party developers can build their own tools and mashups, which in turn helps to fuel the popularity of the web service. It’s hard to imagine where sites like Flickr and Twitter would be today without APIs.

In fact, these days some web services don’t even bother launching websites to go with their APIs — the API is the service. The SimpleGeo API, for example, doesn’t really have a corresponding website, it’s just an API that can be used anywhere, including inside mobile apps.

And APIs aren’t just something for external developers anymore. Increasingly web services are building their own sites and tools around their APIs — after all, why bother with an API if you aren’t going to use it yourself? Twitter is a good example of the “eat your own dog food” approach to APIs; Twitter’s website and its mobile clients are both developed off the same Twitter API that outside developers can tap into.

Former Webmonkey writer Adam DuVander, now Executive Editor at ProgrammableWeb, recently announced that ProgrammableWeb, an API tracking site, now lists some 3000 web-based APIs. To go along with that milestone DuVander breaks down some of the trends in today’s APIs.

It will come as no surprise to those actively developing or using APIs, but the overwhelming trend in APIs is moving toward serving JSON data over a REST interface. As DuVander notes in his post, how many “REST APIs” are truly RESTful is debatable, but certainly SOAP is on its way out and HTTP coupled with OAuth is the future.

When it comes to the data APIs serve up, XML is still the most used format, but JSON is hot on its heels and growing much faster. Even though there are still more XML APIs, the more recent the API, the more likely it’s serving JSON. In many cases — like Twitter’s streaming API and Foursquare’s updated API — companies are rapidly moving from XML to JSON.

The biggest thing that sticks out from ProgrammableWeb’s API trends is that the API, once a sort of “hey, that’s cool” option for progressive websites, is now a first class citizen of the web. Perhaps eventually something better than the REST/OAuth/JSON combo will come along, but the the API and the idea behind it — making data available to the entire web — isn’t going anywhere.

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File Under: Browsers, HTML5
Dec
9
2010

Security Flaws Force Firefox, Opera to Turn Off WebSockets

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Firefox and Opera have both disabled support for HTML5 WebSockets in the latest builds of their respective browsers. The move comes on the heels of a protocol vulnerability that could leave thousands of sites harboring malicious code.

New in HTML5, the WebSocket protocol enables a key mechanism found in modern web apps, allowing servers to independently send data to a client browser without the need for page refreshes or complex JavaScript. The most immediate use for WebSockets are apps that rely on full-duplex communication channels, like web-based chat tools and other real-time sharing apps.

Unfortunately, flaws in the WebSockets protocol also make the current spec easy to exploit.

The vulnerability was discovered by Adam Barth, who has demonstrated that a serious attack against the protocol could poison caches that sit in between the browser and the internet. That means, for example, a common JavaScript file like a Google Analytics script, could be replaced on a cache with a malware file.

As Mozilla’s Hacks Blog notes, the exploit doesn’t just affect browsers implementing WebSockets, but also Flash and Java. As the blog post says, “to avoid a lot of malware showing up without being easily traceable, we need to fix the protocol.”

Details of the exploit can be found in Barth’s paper [PDF link] and a series of messages to the Internet Engineering Task Force mailing list. Fortunately there appears to be a solution, but it will require rewriting some of the WebSockets spec.

However, until that solution is implemented both Mozilla and Opera have disabled support for WebSockets. Mozilla expects other browser to follow suit, though so far Opera is the only other browser to disable support. WebSocket support isn’t just a feature in desktop browsers either, the recent Mobile Safari upgrade in iOS 4.2 added support for WebSockets.

So far neither Adobe, which makes the Flash Player plug-in, nor Oracle, which oversees Java, have addressed the issue.

If you’ve been experimenting with WebSockets, be aware that the as of Firefox 4 Beta 8 (due in the next few days), Mozilla will no longer support your code. Neither will Opera 11. We really don’t expect this to be a long-term issue, so if you want to continue testing apps based on the nascent protocol, you can re-enable the features by changing a hidden preference in Firefox and Opera.

Photo by Andy Butkaj/Flickr/CC

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File Under: Databases
Sep
22
2010

Open Data’s Access Problem, and How to Solve it

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The recent Gov 2.0 summit in Washington D.C. saw several promising new announcements which will help government agencies share code and best practices for making public data available to developers.

The idea behind new projects like Challenge.gov, the FCC’s new developer tools and the Civic Commons is that by giving developers access to data previously stored in dusty filing cabinets, they can create tools to give ordinary citizens greater access to that data.

Unfortunately, not everything open data project leads to good things. It is critical that if open data is made available on the web, it must be accompanied by some effort to ensure everyone can access it.

We’ve seen an explosion in creative hacks that use this newly available data to provide excellent online resources. Public data sites like EveryBlock, or the Sunlight Foundation’s Design for America contest have highlighted some of the amazing ways open data can make our lives better. Whether it’s finding out crime stats, real estate values, health hazards and business license statuses in your neighborhood, or visualizing how the government is spending your tax dollars through innovative maps, open data and what you can do with it is the current hotness among web developers.

Most of the benefits are close to home — in the U.S., just about everyone has access to online government resources thanks to web-enabled computers in free public libraries.

But extend that argument to the rest of the world and the number of people that really have access to the data drops significantly. If you don’t have an easy way to get online, you can’t benefit from open data.

Michael Gurstein, Executive Director of the Center for Community Informatics Research, recently highlighted some of the problems with open data accessibility.

Gurstein points out a number of assumptions about open data that are often overlooked by those most enthusiastic about making such data publicly available.

Worse, he shows how such data can be used against you.

Continue Reading “Open Data’s Access Problem, and How to Solve it” »

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File Under: Fonts, Web Apps
Jul
29
2010

Test Drive Your Type With Google Font Preview

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Google launched a new web-based tool Wednesday that helps you configure, test and easily embed one of the company’s free fonts into your web pages.

The Font Previewer lets you pick one of the open source fonts from Google’s Font Library, then tweak the size, spacing and decorations using simple sliders and buttons. Once you have the type the way you like it, just copy the provided code and paste it into the CSS.

It’s so ridiculously easy, even I was able to use it to change the h1 style on my personal site in about 2 minutes. I chose Pablo Impallari’s Lobster.

Google first took the web font plunge back in May by releasing the Google Font API and publishing a collection of free, open source fonts anyone can use in their designs for free. It also joined up with Typekit (who released an API today) to put together a JavaScript library for designers to control how and when their fonts are loaded.

The fonts in the Font Previewer are the same ones available through the Google Font API. They are quite nice, with a range of script, serif, sans-serif and monospace typefaces. The various typefaces used on the Android devices (Droid), and the old-timey one from Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into HTML5 site (IM Fell) are part of the package.

Here’s Google’s announcement with some more info.

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File Under: APIs, Fonts
Jul
29
2010

Typekit Gets an API

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Font startup Typekit introduced an API Thursday that lets web programmers generate kits from the Typekit library behind the scenes.

The company has previously only offered the option of picking fonts and generating kits using the web-based tool on its site. But by releasing an API, it’s giving people the option of building Typekit into their own apps or simply extending the way they use the service.

Writing on the Typekit blog, Paul Hammond says: “The Typekit API gives you the ability to programmatically create, modify and publish kits. It also allows them to fetch metadata about all the fonts in the Typekit library.”

Here are the documentation pages. As you can see, the Typekit API returns data in a few different flavors (JSON, XML and YAML)

There’s an example page set up on Github, and while there isn’t much there yet (just a kit generator for Ruby) we can expect more soon.

If you haven’t yet explored Typekit’s service for including fancy fonts in your site designs, you should. Especially handy is the WebFont Loader, an open source library of scripts that Typekit developed to help eliminate the “flash of unstyled text” that happens when a page loads. The WebFont Loader offers a number of JavaScript events which allow developers more control over when and how their fonts are loaded onto the page.

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File Under: Events, Identity, Social
Apr
14
2010

Twitter Switches on @Anywhere

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This is an @anywhere hovercard

This is an @anywhere hovercard

SAN FRANCISCO, California — Twitter’s @anywhere features are now live for developers to start using, the company has announced.

Developers can begin using the system to integrate different kinds of Twitter engagement directly into their sites or apps. You can find details about it at the new Twitter developer site (which also launched Wednesday) at dev.twitter.com.

@Anywhere basically provides a way to let Twitter users follow other people and send tweets directly from within your web page or app.

The key component is the “hovercard” — you’ve seen them on the Twitter website for the last month or so. Any time you see somebody’s Twitter handle mentioned, you can hover over that person’s handle and a little window pops up showing their profile photo, location, short bio, number of followers, and — the key part — a “Follow” button you can click and add them to your follow list right there, without leaving the page.

The announcement was made by Twitter’s head of platform Ryan Sarver at Chirp, the company’s developer conference happening here.

You can start dropping hovercards onto your site using “a few lines of JavaScript” (outlined on the documentation page at Twitter’s development site).

It’s interesting to see so much excitement around hovercards, which have a lot in common with hCards, the microformat standard for publishing and sharing contact information on the web. Microformats have been around for a while but they haven’t really been widely adopted, and it will be interesting to see if rebooting the idea on top of the Twitter platform — a social layer that makes them more accessible and relevant– will give new life to the concept.

The other components of @anywhere are the “Connect with Twitter” (a remote sign-in system) and the Tweetbox, which you can embed in your page and let people send tweets directly from the page.

Sarver brought out some media partners to talk about how they’re deploying @anywhere features. There were some impressive presentations from The New York Times, Yahoo and MSNBC News. If you’re reading a story on one of their websites, you can see a hovercard when you hover over a journalist’s name and start following them immediately.

One other announcement from Sarver: Twitter is turning on an as-yet-undocumented feature called Annotations this week. It allows developers to add any kinds of metadata they want to tweets. The obvious one is content-specific tags, but we should see other implementations of Annotations when developers start playing with them at the Chirp Hack Day taking place tonight and Thursday.

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File Under: Events, Location
Apr
14
2010

Twitter Launches ‘Points of Interest’ Pages for Locations

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SAN FRANCISCO, California — Twitter is adding location-based place pages to its website, the company has announced.

The new feature is called Points of Interest. Starting soon, users will be able to click on a place name (or a location tag, if one exists) in a tweet and see that place on a map. Next to the map, they’ll also be able to see what people are saying about that place in a search results view. From what we’ve seen, it’s a convenient entry point into the current Twitter chatter about a certain place or city.

There will be an API for developers, which we’ll learn more about later today. The API will let developers build this feature into client apps, so it will be accessible from more places than just the Twitter website soon enough.

The announcement was made by Twitter CEO Evan Williams at the company’s Chirp developer conference taking place here Wednesday.

There are several hundred developers here at Chirp, and the announcement drew a round of applause from the audience.

“I think it’s a big step forward for the Twitter platform,” says Andy Gadiel, founder and president of JamBase, a social website for finding live music shows and events in cities worldwide. “Location is all about relevancy. Not just where you are in terms of a latitude and longitude point, but a real place in the world.”

We’ve seen huge growth around location-based services lately, especially on mobiles, where it’s become central to the user experience of almost every search-based or social app. Late last year, Twitter added the ability for users to add location to tweets, something that made tweets more relevant for search applications. The location tags are basically geotags indicating latitude and longitude, or latlongs. Also, Facebook recently added location-sharing for its users’ status updates as well.

Just after the announcement, Williams fielded a question from the audience: Will Twitter have a check-in behavior around Points of Interest, a la Foursquare?

His response:

“We’re not looking to duplicate the functionality of Foursquare or Gowalla. We want to make those services work better with Twitter. If you’re writing a tweet about a place and you type the name of that place, that’s sort of a check-in. But what we’re really interested in is what you’re saying about that place.”

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File Under: APIs, Location
Feb
15
2010

Using the Google Maps API

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Google Maps is perhaps the biggest and most useful of all the common web APIs. Who doesn’t love clicking and dragging those sleek, clean maps? But it’s also one of the more complex APIs, which can be intimidating for newcomers. It’s also somewhat difficult to immediately recognize all the possibilities of the Google Maps API since there are literally hundreds of ways to use it.

We’re going to dive right in. But to keep things simple, we’ll start with a very common use: Adding a map to your site and displaying some markers.


Continue Reading “Using the Google Maps API” »

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File Under: APIs, Web Apps
Nov
4
2009

Discover Cool Photo Apps With Flickr’s New ‘App Garden’

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Everyone has an app store these days. But of course, for Flickr, the photo sharing site that brought you rainbow vomiting Panda Bears, “store” is far too pedestrian. Which is why Flickr has launched a new App Garden. The new Flickr App Garden consists of mobile, desktop, and online widgets that interact with Flickr and help you get more out of the site. Flickr already had an extensive list of such apps in its “Services” area, but the new App Garden is considerably simpler and makes find cool Flickr apps much easier. Unlike the former app directory, which was a simple list, Flickr’s App Garden gives each app its own page where users can leave comments, tag apps and mark them as favorites. The ability to favorite an app means users now have a way to promote their favorites in the App Garden showcase. The app pages also look and feel just like a Flickr photo pages, which makes App Garden feel more like a part of Flickr than the old services directory ever did. To make it even easier to discover cool apps, Flickr has also included tags on user’s photos which tell you what app the image was uploaded with, and then link back to that app in the new App Garden. If you don’t want others to know how you upload your photos, you can turn off the new tags in your account settings. The result is that you can stumble across some very cool stuff like Suggestify, an app that allows you to geotag other people’s photos by suggesting a location to the photo’s owner. Following the tag “geotag” then led us to an interesting iPhone app, FlickrUp, which lets you geotag photos uploaded from the iPhone. So far there’s no way for developers to charge for applications through the Flickr App Garden, though there are some non-free apps listed. Since actually download the apps you want — whether free or not — requires at trip to the developer’s own page, it seems that, at least for now, the App Garden is more a place to browse, not buy apps. See Also:
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File Under: Web Basics
Sep
4
2009

HTML5 Drag-and-Drop API Is no Panacea for Developers

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We’ve all seen it happen: a less web savvy friend wants to upload an image so they grab it from the desktop and drag it over to their web browser where… nothing happens. It’s good for a chuckle every now and then, but really, isn’t that exactly how you should upload a file to the web? After all, it works everywhere else on your PC. Developers have been pining for drag-and-drop support in webapps pretty much since the first servers came online. But now, with HTML5 nearly here, true drag and drop support is about to become a reality. Yes, there are JavaScript libraries that allow you to create drag-and-drop interfaces within the browser, but that’s not what we’re talking about. Rather, HTML5 offers the holy grail — drag a file from your desktop straight to a browser window and it will magically upload. Of course, for developers, nothing is every that easy. The drag-and-drop portion of the HTML5 spec is very new, incomplete and at the moment, really only works in a very limited form in Firefox 3.5 and Safari nightly builds. But that doesn’t mean people are starting to experiment with it. Leslie Orchard of Mozilla recently posted a very nice tutorial that will walk you through the basics of the HTML5 drag-and-drop API and help you create a little demo app (another nice working demo can be found over at The CSS Ninja). Orchard concludes that the “first-class drag and drop events in HTML5 and Firefox make supporting this form of UI interaction simple, concise, and powerful.” However, web developer Francisco Tolmasky has a decidedly different take. Tolmasky recently posted about his experiences implementing a drag-and-drop interface for his slide presentation web app, 280 North (think Keynote in the browser). Tolmasky found that not only are there a number of browser bugs and implementation shortcomings, but the spec itself is flawed in many ways. For example, as Tolmasky discovered, there is no reliable way to determine whether a user wants to drag an object, or simply select several by dragging to highlight them. Another problem, and one that’s more prominent in the other side of the drag-and-drop experience (i.e. dragging out of or within the browser) is the complexity involved in figuring out where the user plans to drop the selected item and how that effects what the webapp should do with the item:
Take 280 Slides for example: When a user drags the slides out of slides navigator, he may be planning to drop it to any number of locations. If he is dragging it from one instance of 280 Slides to another, then we want to provide a serialized version of these slides so that they can be added to the other presentation. If however, he drags these slides into a program like Photoshop, then we would want to provide image data. If he were to drag them to his desktop, then perhaps we could provide a PDF version. He could even drag them to his text editor and expect the text contents of his slides to be pasted.
Desktop APIs provide hooks to delay the “what do I do with this object” problem until you actually drop the object somewhere, which saves a ton of processing overhead. But the HTML5 spec currently doesn’t have any such delays. And, in the case of dragging a large number of objects, this shortcoming can result in significant lag times. Luckily the HTML5 drap-and-drop API is still a work in progress. The WHATWG is still gathering developer feedback. As always, if you’ve got ideas or solutions let them know on the official WHATWG mailing list. See Also:
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