RantOn: External Services and API

/rant on

While taking a break from the work effort I thought it may be cool to write a tiny module that was pluggable for my blog and possibly other services. I’m a huge fan of iLike. I love music and listen to it all the time. However, there are never enough hours in the day to find new artists and new music. Pandora is a great tool for this too but it’s not socially generated. This is where iLike has hit the nail on the head. Where they fail however is opening their API.

I am of the opinion that if you are gathering information for social networking purposes that you should allow developers to extend that functionality. I felt like creating a fast little php template that pulled information in from their site that I had full control over. Generally not too much to ask. LibraryThing, del.icio.us, and others do it so I assumed that iLike would do the same. However, it appears that they are more geared towards having their own marketing than letting anyone create what they want. They have a flash widget that they allow you to put on your site, but what about those people that want to customize the look and functionality? This widget is very limiting.

The problem I have with this and any other service that leaves out the open API is that they are really restricting the developer community from making awesome applications utilizing their services. I tend to like to customize the look & feel and functionality of tools and sites that I create. Why cant it be the same with services like that. It’s really not complicated to make rpc/soap available to the community, so why not do it?

My plea to all of you creating new applications. Make time and some effort for services. Provide some external API that developers can plug into and use. It will not only help them, but it will help you too. Be kind to the community. Give back, give us an API.
/rant off

Clearspring and Widgets…What?

So I heard about this company called Clearspring and heard that they were, in a sense, just some host for widgets. At first this made no sense to me, thus I had to check it out to see what it was all about. Here’s my report.

Clearspring has a pretty cool thing going on. I’m not convinced it’s going to be the end-all, be-all method for widgetry, but what I am convinced about is the start of something interesting. Clearspring has taken the idea behind DRY in the Pragmatic Programmer’s guide to development, and are trying to apply that principle to website developers. All you need is a little bit of time, elbow/knuckle grease, and a server that allows for some processing. Hell, if you don’t even need to take in parameters you could just use straight up Apache.

So this is how it works. Developer Nick decides to create an addition to his blog, The Digital Tumbleweed. Lets just say that he wants to add the Library Thing Widget to his blog. Library Thing has, in awesome delight, provided most of the work for us. We just go and select some parameters right? Well, what if I want to use that same widget to do different things on my site. Also, what about tracking purposes? How do I know who else is using this widget? Can I put this widget into facebook too? I mean, really…library thing is all about social networking right?

Clearspring has taken care of a number of these things for us. All I had to do was write a _tiny_ amount of php and then tell clearspring where to look for the code to include. Library Thing takes in the parameters and then generates all the data I’ve requested.

You can see the LibraryThing Widget Homepage, but the widget itself is in action on my site…just peer to the right and down a few scrolls.
Now, I suspect that for some the high level overview is enough to satisfy the craving for info…that or I’ve bored you to tears by now. So feel free to skip this next part…I’m going to get a tiny bit technical. The way this all works is through the use of iframes and flash. No, iframes are not like tiles. Basically whats going on is:

1. You include a bit of JS on your site. Instead of an include or something similar, you are just throwing a script tag in there. Therefore, less processing on your server side. Leave it to the client side…wise or not? Meh…it works for now.
2. This JS is processed client side which makes a call to the clearspring servers.
3. The JS is replaced with new code, an iframe/flash, which shows the results of the processed JS.
4. This new rendering is what you see on your page where you would have normally set your .

The steps and setup I’ve just described are really that simple. The only semi confusing thing here is with the CSS in the widget. If you are including an iframe, your normal stylesheet does not apply to the content in the iframe. Be sure to take care of the CSS inside there.

Is Clearspring the future of web application development? Are reusable, hosted sets of code the next big “advance” in technology? I think only time can tell that, but I will say that they do have a good thing going on. It will be interesting to watch their success.