API's bringing big cash to Mashery

Now a days every website is cashing on using APIs to become a platform. Mashery, a company that has hosted APIs for companies and helped manage them, was rewarded with a $5.5 million series of funding. The huge technology company, Cisco, as well as some other companies are the investors in this round of funding.

CEO of Mashery, Oren Michels, stated in the article that so many companies are beginning to test the waters of API and are seeing significant raises in revenue as well as the growth of their companies. Michels goes on to say that companies are seeing the importance of letting their customers interact with they services instead of forcing them to do everything at the companies website. I would say that companies willingness to develop APIs are also very important to education, such as the students of IS449w being able to complete there projects for the course!

Mashery will use this new money to hire more people in sales and marketing to be able to expand their product. Currently there are 40,000 developers connected to the website. Some of the bigger names being: Bestbuy, Netflix and New York Times. I think this is another great website, other than programmable web, that we can use to gather information of our APIs. Also check out 3scale. The article lists them as Mashery's competitor.

The Original article was Posted on TechCrunch

Ajax Group Iteration 1

I'm really excited about our group project and can't wait to see how things develop as we go. So far we have completed iteration 1 and have a good idea of what we want our site to do. Our web page will be a place for younger people especially recent graduates to go and search for careers, find local places to live, and give the weather for that location. This information will display using Google Maps.

For iteration 1 we had a simple web page and used the button onClick event handlers to display our information. This was just a starting point to demonstrate the xmlhttprequest and our basic plan. We have already started the design layout for iteration 2 which will show how our actual site will look.


We are continuing to work towards iteration 2 and get a better understanding of the API's we will be using. Using the Proxy-pass through we plan to return the xml and find the information we need. When things begin to come together, we will know if we need make modifications or additions to our original plan.

Ajax Iteration 1

For Iteration 1 I decided to use two buttons with the onClick event handlers. One of the buttons returns the server time and the other returns a web page with my web service choices. I created a div for the buttons pane and one for the information display.



My idea for the next two Iterations is to use the Google Talk API and the class Blogger API. The plan is to mashup these API's and allow us in class to chat live while we are logged into the blogger. The idea is similar to how this works on Facebook. When you are logged into Facebook you can chat live with other people in your friends list.

I'm not sure yet if this will work like I want it to but its a starting point. I'm continuing to research more API's and look forward to seeing if I can find more project ideas. If anyone has any suggestions for me, please let me know.

Job Search

Like me, most of us are about to graduate and I am sure that we all want better paid jobs or actually find a job since we will be having a new degree. Well, while I was looking for jobs I got across a really cool job search engine. It is interesting how google is trying to be on top in search engine industry because this tool is powered by them. It is nothing like the famous Monster or Careerbuilder. I could say it is less hassle to work on and actually have better search results.

I am not sure what technology stays behind it, but it pretty much just asks you the type of job city and money that you would like to be paid. From that point the engine searches through different job listing sites and displays them based on the time on which they were posted. For example if you search for an IT job you will get results coming from Dice, Monster, CareerBuilder and even from company's itself.

I think this tool is pretty cool because it takes away the hassle of creating an account and spend time in registering. In addition it pulls listings from multiple resources so you do not have be registered in multiple places. The name of the site is indeed. com

Group Iteration 2

Well we made it through iteration 2 and are now working to complete iteration 3. For iteration 2 I used buttons with onClick event handlers to make requests using the proxy pass through to retrieve web services for the Wine.com API and the Blog API. Also, I incorporated the Google Map into our web page.


Right now I am still working on taking this raw xml data and tyring to parse it into useful information. I am having a little difficullty figuring out some of this. We also need to add in one more API into our page.

Many of the class had great suggestions for adding another API. I am completely open to all suggestions and advice. Hopefully this will all come together over the next four weeks and the project will be ready for iteration 3.

Working with Google Maps

We have plans to use the Google Maps API in our group project, so I have decided to try it out in this simple web page.

I got a lot of great information from Joshua Guest's blog post which was a wonderful explanation and detailed process for setting up this API and the Google Maps API reference site.

So far I have been able to display the map with some functionality that allows the user to zoom in and out, change view from standard to satellite, hybrid, or terrain, and show the starting location as Michigan.

I am off to a good start and excited about incorporating this API in our group project.

Individual Iteration 2

Iteration 2 for our individual project required that I fetch a file from a web service using the php pass through and incorporate it into my web page without using a an alert box and demonstrate actions tied to event handlers.

In my webpage I have chosen to create two buttons which use the onclick event handler that get services from the sponge cell calender API and the yahoo weather API using the php pass through for each.

I am continuing to work on my individual project and make this information useful. There is still a lot of things I don't quite understand when it comes to manipulating the data. I am looking forward to finding new ways to retrieve and display specific information.

Here is an image of how my web page has turned out so far:

Group Project

For our group project iteration 1 we had to do something very similar to our individual project. We needed to fetch a static file from our web server and integrate it into our web page using xmlhttprequest, identify use cases, state what web service API's we plan to use, and a project plan.

When our group was first formed we had some trouble deciding what type of site to create. Initially we thought of working with the game API's but it was difficult to find ones that we could actually use. After some time we came up with a new idea for our site. We found a great API about wine and wineries that we can use. Our plan is to take the Wine.com API with the Google Maps API and form a mashup to show winery locations over the map, and the Blogger Data API with ZoomClouds API as a mashup for blogging with a tag cloud.

Iteration 1 is now complete and we are looking forward to incorporating the API's into our web page. We are happy that we have an idea that will hopefully work for our group project. Here is an image of how our site looks so far.

Express Yourself!

I tried out the Expression Web editor in the CIS lab. Compared to Notepad++ which I was using before, this editor has so many more great features to create web pages.

Expression Web makes creating compliant standards-based Web sites faster and easier.

It has a state-of-the-art design surface that generates clean CSS, and you can make design decisions right away, and you can see the representation of the final browser-rendered page.

It has drag and drop controls to add rich media with support for a broad range of essential Web technologies, such as PHP, JavaScript, XML/XSLT, and ASP.NET you can use the same tool for both visual design and coding.

The great news is that Microsoft offers a free 60 day trial version you can download at home.

API

A few days after we had the class I start thinking about the APIs. I did see what they are but I never had a clear view on what really an API is, or who how and why it is created. Since we began thinking about the project. I found out that it is really important to know that there is a developed API that can support our idea. We already had several ideas, but since we could not find an API for it, we had to leave them. That is why we began our project of finding what APIs are there, and what they are used for. But as I sad earlier I wanted to know what an API is, so I went to the following link to find out more http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_programming_interface.
As defined on Wikipedia an Application programming interface (API) is an interface in computer science that defines the ways by which an application program may request services from libraries and/or operating system. An API determines the vocabulary and calling the programmer should employ to use the services. It may include specifications for routines, data structures, object classes and protocols used to communicate between the requesting software and the library.
But when used in the context of web development, an API is typically a defined set of Hypertext Transfer Protocol request messages along with a definition of the structure of response messages, usually expressed in an Extensible Markup Language or JavaScript Object Notation format. While "Web API" is virtually a synonym for web service, the recent trend (so-called Web 2.0) has been away from Simple Object Access Protocol based services towards more direct (REST) style communications. Web APIs allow the combination of multiple services into new applications known as mashups.
The interesting thing is that in order to use APIs we must fallow certain policies Companies do not release API information to anybody outside of the company.
Companies protect information on their APIs from the general public. For example, Spny used to make its official Play Station 2API available only to licensed PlayStation developers. This enabled Sony to control who wrote PlayStation 2 games. Such control can have quality control benefits and potential license revenue.
Companies make their APIs freely available. For example, Microsoft makes the Microsoft Windown API public and Apple releases its APIs Carbon and Cocoa so that software can be written for their platform.