There are already several APIs available that cover blogging – and that’s good, because the odds are low that any given third-party app will be able to use any random API we dream up (yay, standards!) The goal here is using a third-party app for posting to a blog. Flickr has an API, Amazon has an API, Google has several - and they are each unique to themselves. In the big-picture sense: an API is a standard, structured definition of what your Web Service does. SOAP ( spec) is heavier-duty stuff, with namespaces and other features that I’m sure someone will tell me are absolutely vital, but, for the purposes of this blog API business, XML-RPC is all you really need to know.
XML-RPC ( spec) seems the simplest to me, it’s actually pretty close to the above. There are two dominant standards: SOAP and XML-RPC. Per my hypothetical example above, might send something like:īut you can’t really use just any XML you make up off the top of your head. On the technical side, Web Services are all about XML: Your app will receive a POSTed chunk of XML and translate that into magical programming goodness and reply with XML. If you’re writing a blog engine, you might want to let people post to your blog using third-party apps that do cool WYSIKSMWYG things. If you’re writing a search engine or product database, you might want to let people style or customize the results of a search. So, if you have some function “do_cool_stuff(key)” and you want to be able to use it. In general, the idea with Web Services is that you’re exposing part of your app to some other app. That said, except for this post, I haven’t found a very good explanation for how Typo does it, and remember I have that NIH syndrome? Right. In all fairness, Typo did it first, and in almost all cases, Typo does it better. And, actually, that chapter in AWDWR wasn’t all that helpful.įinally, a disclaimer: In addition to AWDWR, what follows owes quite a lot to Typo.
After saying that, and Googling a bit for supporting evidence, I realized that there wasn’t a lot out there in the way of HOW-TOs and Tutorials for this kind of thing. After a dreadful experience using PHP as a SOAP client, I was just telling someone a week or three ago that Web Services in Rails were really, really easy, based on my 50 second skimming of the appropriately titled chapter in AWDWR (I have the 1st Ed - for all I know, the 2nd Ed is a different beast). (Alright, I’ll come clean: the main reason is to get the benefits of a fancy WYISKSMWYG HTML editor.) Although… the results don’t work quite the way I wanted (Flock’s fault, I assure you – it works great in MarsEdit, and I’m posting this using BlogJet (which also has bugs, but don’t let that distract you!) The point is: It works well enough for me. I recently added support for the MetaWeblog API – with the intention of being able to blog from Flock, a newish browser that has a spiffy, built-in blogging system.
This blog (the one you’re reading now) is a custom Ruby on Rails application, built because I either have an insatiable desire to learn new things or a chronic case of Not Invented Here syndrome – take your pick.
0 kommentar(er)
