A Look at HipChat’s API »

While Twitter and other web 2.0 applications have changed public communications, companies have been clamoring for similar messaging systems for internal use. Used by over 1,000 companies and teams, HipChat is a great solution with deep features to help you supercharge your company's communications. You can create chat rooms for meetings, use it on your mobile phone, have a one-on-one chat with anybody in your company, and securely share files. HipChat recently released their very own API, which is well-designed and documented. Here's a quick demo of what makes HipChat great:

Since Garret Heaton of HipChat uses Apigee, we asked him to answer 5 questions for us:

What do you wish your API would do that it doesn't do today?

Garret:Obviously it'd be nice to have support for all the features users have access to when using HipChat: changing room topics, sending invites, uploading files, creating rooms, etc. It'd also be awesome to have a streaming API (and open up full access via XMPP) so users could build bots and other real-time services.

If you could send one message about building your API back in time to yourself, what would it be?

Garret:Keep it simple! The first versions of our API had a more complex interface for passing auth information, desired response format, and entity IDs. Our initial testers were often confused. It's important for new users to be able to test the API easily using cURL.

What insights into your app or other benefits have you gotten from working with Apigee?

Garret:The 'Response Time' data is really helpful for identifying slower requests. It's really nice not having to build this ourselves. The new debug console is also incredibly helpful when you need to see what your exact request/response data looks like.

What new Apigee feature would you most like to see from Apigee?

Garret:I know you're already working on it, but HTTPS support for mapped domains so our users can use HTTPS [NB: It's coming very soon, we promise!]. Also, a way to create a test console for our API. I think our users would find that very helpful.

How would you like to see developers make use of your API once it is exposed?

Garret:It'd be awesome to have plugins for sending HipChat messages available for lots of other software: Capistrano, Nagios, Subversion, Git, Perforce, Trac, Get Satisfaction, CoTweet, and many other cloud-based tools companies are using these days. We're also looking forward to seeing the creative things people will build that we haven't even thought of yet!

If you're looking for a great collaboration tool to improve your internal communications, be sure to check out HipChat. And keep telling us what Apigee features you'd like to see next so we can provide a better service for you!