Apigee on the Road »

Wrap Up: API Developer Day, London »

We spent this past Saturday in London at TechHub hacking with developers, learning about new APIs, and hanging out with some of the hottest API companies in the city for API Developer Day.

In the morning we had short technical lightning talks from the Twitter API team, who presented on Web Intents; Pusher, an API for real-time events (and they have an awesome first developer experience!); Nestoria, which opens up real estate listings and pricing data; Datasift, which provides access to the Twitter firehose and real-time data from various social sources; and Tropo, a telephony API. There was also an in-depth look at BlueVia, a network services API platform giving access to core capabilities including SMS, MMS, Location, Payment and more. Thanks to BlueVia for sponsoring the event and making the event possible! Stay tuned because we'll be posting the presentations from each API team soon. 

Then it was time to start coding. After 7 or 8 hours, we'd learned a lot about some new APIs, met new team members and got to work on new projects and app ideas. We awarded prizes to the top applications, check them out below: 

• Who Has The X-Factor (1st place): This app used the Twitter firehose through Datasift to create live, moving graphs of the popularity of various X Factor TV contestants using sentiment analysis. 
• Bute (2nd place): The app was designed to create awareness and engagement around local charities, highlighting social media buzz, social support for them, and a map of local charity events. The app also allows you to easily make mobile donations to charity, using the BlueVia Payments APIs and their SMS API to send notifications to users.   
• Team Unicorn Warrior (3rd place): This geolocation and data mashup used Google Maps, the Nestoria real estate API and Foursquare API to show average prices of housing in certain neighborhoods and display nearby attractions, restaurants and venues. 
• Noughts and Crosses (Runner up): A Twitter-integrated two-player online game of tic-tac-toe using Pusher and game logic to send moves to player screens. 

Thanks to everyone who participated, sponsored and spoke! We look forward to seeing you again for more events in London soon. Stay in touch with where in the world we're hacking using Twitter or our Facebook Events page. 

Mobile App Hackathon Comes to San Francisco 10/22 »

Hey San Francisco! Mark your calendars for Saturday, October 22. We're teaming up with AT&T to put on Mobile App Hackathon San Francisco - a one-day hackathon where you can learn about new APIs and mobile technology, bring a team or find a new one and build a mobile app in one day. We'll be at the AT&T / Twitter building downtown and will have developer support on-hand from some of the hottest local companies making moves in the mobile space. 

Beyond giving you the space, time, wifi and excellent eating you need to build something amazing in just a day, Mobile App Hackathons provide short technical talks and all-day developer support so you can learn something new and stay on the cutting edge. So for the San Francisco event, we're bringing out some of our best mobile friends.

Come find out about what Heroku is doing with Stackmob for your mobile backend. Hot on adding SMS, VOIP and voice to your app? Attendees will get exclusive access and support for the Twilio Client iOS SDK beta. Try out our new Objective-C library for the OAuth API or use our API Consoles to get started with Twilio, Twitter, Facebook, SimpleGeo and other top APIs. Plus great education and help from ARM, Marmalade and HTC. 

We've done Mobile App Hackathons all over the country - from Chicago to San Diego, Atlanta to Seattle, and we can't wait to bring it back to the Valley.

Don't forget to mark your calendars because we're coming to a city near you, with events planned in Washington, D.C., Dallas, Boston, Orlando and more on the way. You can keep up with Mobile App Hackathons on our Facebook page, or check out the Apigee page for details on these and other events you can find us at.   

Apigee Goes to London - Come Code With Us at API Developer Day »

Next month we're coming to London to learn about new APIs, network with friends new and old, and build some great apps. We hope you'll join us for API Developer Day, an API-themed hackathon focused on building an app in one day. It will take place on Saturday, October 1 at TechHub in London and we want you to come hack with us. In the morning we'll have a lightning pitch session where local API teams, startups and platforms get their 5 minutes of demo fame to show off their API and convince you to build an app with it. Then get into your team, find a new one or go solo to build the best thing you can with the APIs you love, demo it at the end of the day and get a chance to win prizes. It's free and food and drink will be provided all day. 

If you'll be in London on October 1, register at http://apideveloperday.eventbrite.com/ and come hack with us! You'll get to learn about the BlueVia platform and our developers tools - including our new OAuth API to take the pain out of OAuth. If you have an API you'd like to demo in the morning pitches, shoot me a note at shanley -at- apigee.com and I'll get you signed up!  

Not going to make it this time? Join us again on November 11 for the Power of One Conference in Battersea, South London - bringing developers and entrepreneurs together to celebrate how much the individual can achieve in today's tech industry. Our Sam Ramji will present among industry luminaries including David McCandless, Morten Lund, Elizabeth Varley and more.  

Mobile App Hackathon Silicon Valley - Wrap Up! »

This weekend we teamed up with AT&T and PayPal's developer program to hold a one-day coding event focused on building mobile apps. This was our first Mobile App Hackathon in our home turf (we've been to Seattle, Portland and San Diego and hope you will join us August 27 in Chicago!).

It was great to see so many familiar faces and some new ones!

The event was attended by over 160 developers and designers who built a total of 27 apps in a single day. The hackathon winners were: 

• Travel Wishlist - An application that leverages and personalizes the travel experience by connecting you with local tour guides to help you discover new cultures, places, adventures and excursions.

• My Clipper Rewards - An application to reduce traffic congestion, fuel emissions, and parking issues by a reward incentive to use public transportation in the Bay Area. 

• Shipmate - Gets package details from the user and compares shipping prices with different APIs and services. Users can then pick their choice of shipment and submit. 

• Twitter Battle - A simple app to virtually use your Twitter followers as an army.

Apps built were a healthy mix of native and HTML5 and there were some awesome applications built with Sencha, Pearson, PayPal, AppMobi and tons of APIs. It's amazing to see how new technologies and frameworks are making it possible to build complex, creative applications more quickly than ever. And congratulations to the winner of the Apigee contest, Bob Anderson, for his work building an application with Apigee Source! 

Hope to see some of you in Chicago for our next Mobile App Hackathon - and look for one in a city near you. We're planning to visit cities including New York, Dallas, Austin, Orlando and more.

Mobile App Hackathon Redmond and Silicon Valley »

We've been partnering with the AT&T Developer Program to bring developers together to build mobile apps, learn about new technologies, network, demo their work and even compete for prizes. So far we've brought Mobile App Hackathons to Seattle and San Diego, and next we're coming to Redmond, WA and San Jose right here in the Valley! 

You can RSVP on our event pages - they are free! 

• Mobile App Hackathon, Redmond (ThinkSpace) - Saturday, June 16 
• Mobile App Hackathon, San Jose (PayPal HQ) - Saturday, August 6 

The Hackathons are set up to get people on the fast-track to build something working and demonstrable by the end of the day - an opportunity to find new teammates, work on that project you've been itching to start, and have dedicated time and support to work with new APIs, frameworks and technology.

We've got a full day of coding, lightning talks, and developer support from sponsor companies including Docusign, Sencha, AppMobi, RedFoundry, MongoLabs, Amazon Web Services, Rhomobile and more.  

At the end of the day, teams or individuals can demo their work to better the community and hey, even win some prizes! We're looking to bring the events to other cities across the US ... and maybe even other countries! Stay tuned. 

APIs Shine at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon »

We're spending the weekend in New York with the city's top hackers, makers and even some travelers (lots of SF devs on that Friday-night redeye!) for the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon- 500 developers, a lot of caffeine and 24 hours to build something for fortune, fame and fun. Here are some of the APIs that shined and our top observations from the event as we take in the live demos.

#1 New York's Tech Scene is On Fire! 

The energy at the event is amazing and the hacks being demoed right now, from GitHub for legal documents to facial recognition for Facebook, prove that NYC can definitely take on San Francisco for top dev talent, creativity and fast innovation. Check out @mager's live blog on ZDNet for more hacks and we're really looking forward to getting more involved in the New York scene, so if you're NY-local and want to chat, shoot us a note on Twitter!

#2 APIs Aren't Just About Data - They're About Exposing Powerful Services, Gracefully

The APIs on the tongues and fingertips of developers today go beyond simply providing programatic access to data - they let developers incorporate powerful, cutting edge technology into their applications quickly and easily with RESTful interfaces, shiny new libraries and SDKs and better tools. Some of the brightest here are telephony kingpins Twilio and geolocation heroes SimpleGeo, but there are some new kids on the block.

Here are our favorite APIs from the show: 

Aviary: The new photo hotness, Aviary provides an image-editing API to style, correct and beautify photos, plus all that utility goodness like cropping and thumbnails. For anyone who has ever struggled to implement photo editing in their apps the old fashioned way, Aviary is pretty exciting and there's lots of chatter about them on the ground at TechCrunch Disrupt.  

Echo Nest: Representing for music disruption, Echo Nest provides a real-time API to deliver tons of data and services, from artist data to audio previews, recommendations and audio streams. And of course you must check out their Remix API, an internet synthesizer for music and video. 

Face.com: Face.com provides an API to let developers incorporate facial recognition into their apps, and they're causing a lot of buzz. Facial recognition + REST - it's some cutting edge stuff, and creates pretty impressive demo material when hooked up with social platforms. 

TokBox: TokBox lets you add video chat into your site or web app, using either some nifty easy widgets or their free API. It's helping make video conferencing easier, faster, and more ubiquitous, plus giving more control to developers and end users. We love APIs that put the power of complex services like video chat into the hands of developers, focusing on speed and ease of use. 

#3 Developer Evangelism Is Here to Stay 

Pioneered by industry titans like Google and Microsoft and perfected by today's API pros like Twilio, the art and science of developer evangelism and advocacy shines at TechCrunch Disrupt. API providers are clearly recognizing that developer advocates and community builders are key to API adoption, and there are lots of them on set to help developers get started, troubleshoot, help build cool things and spread the word. Good developer advocates are hard to find but we're happy to see growing industry recognition of the important role they play in bringing great technologies to developers. 

Finally, if you're on the ground, let's meet up - we'll give you an I <3 APIs t-shirt! 

API Hack Day Comes to Chicago - »

API Hack Day - the all-day API coding fest - is coming to Chicago Saturday, May 28 right after PHP Tek. API Hack Day brings developer together to focus on building projects and apps with APIs. It's designed so developers of all experience levels can form teams, meet new friends, work on projects, and find out about great tools and new APIs to play with.

We're hosting it at the Morningstar offices, home of the Morningstar Tech Talks, free and open meetups focused on technology discussions ranging from open source to dev ops. And you'll hear from us, Twilio, SendGrid and Mashery on some great technology to help you build better apps, plus pick up some SimpleGeo swag so you can look good doing it.    

Visit our registration page to sign up. Thanks to our friends at PHP Tek, registrants will receive a $50 discount code to attend the best PHP conference of the year, happening Tuesday - Friday, May 24-27, right before API Hack Day Chicago. So you can attend PHP Tek and then put your new skills to work on the weekend. 

Plus we just launched the official website for API Hack Day, www.apihackday.com. Check it out to see pics of smiling attendees and to keep up to date on future events.

Web 2.0 Talk: Punctuated Equilibrium, Celestial Navigation, and APIs »

Web 2.0 Expo started up today in San Francisco's Moscone West. This Wednesday, 3/30, I'll be speaking with top Netflix engineers Michael Hart and Daniel Jacobson (formerly NPR) on succeeding in the API economy with "Punctuated Equilibrium, Celestial Navigation, and APIs: Lessons from Netflix and NPR." I hope you'll join us Wednesday at 9:00 am in room 2005. 

In evolutionary theory, punctuated equilibrium refers to a period of significant environmental stress resulting in rapid, dramatic changes among species. It is a powerful model for understanding the changes in technology, business models and data over the last few decades - changes that have given rise to the age of APIs. In this talk, we'll look at three key themes in the API economy: 

• The Evolution of Business Models: From 1st Party to Partner to Platform 
• The Evolution of Architecture: From Mainframe to Mobile
• The Evolution of Data: From Silos to Social 

Attendees will walk away from the talk with an actionable strategic framework and best practices for winning the market with APIs, including creating developer and partner success, diversifying the core, getting to mobile, exposing the right functionalities and gaining adoption. Hope to see you there and let me know on Twitter if you want to meet up. 

Building Developer Communities and API Champions »

Some of the most frequent questions we get are about how to build developer community and adoption around open APIs. Every month or two, we host an API meetup in San Francisco with our friends IP Commerce to talk about these and other API and platform topics. We post videos and content at www.apimeetup.com so everyone can see and share.  

This is a video from hacker advocate Abraham Williams called "Please Feed the Unicorns" - a real-talk guide on bootstrapping and scaling a developer community, with special attention to nurturing and caring for your champions. A must-watch for any API provider interested in doing community right - check out the video and slides below and go to the API Meetup site to see more great API content on community, developers, open platforms and more tasty treats.

Going to SXSW? Join Us for the Hottest Developer Party - GET Down »

We're throwing a big developer bash at SXSW with SendGrid, Twilio and SimpleGeo. It's on Sunday, March 13th at the PureVolume House, just a block away from the Austin convention center. And it's the only club in town open past 2:00 am. RSVP at http://getdownparty.com/ - featuring a live performance by innerpartysystem and a DJ set by moneypenny. 

We'll have a few members of our team on the ground for SXSWi. We built a schedule of talks and events focused on our favorite things: apps, developers, platforms and APIs, check it out. And if you're going, let's meet up - email us at marketing -at- apigee.com or shoot us a note on Twitter!   

Check out some beats from GET Down - moneypenny! 

RESTful API Design: Teach a Dog to REST »

UPDATED November 2011: Check out the second edition of the webinar - RESTful API Design.

It's been 10 years since Roy Fielding first defined REST in his dissertation on Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures. Since then, REST is often held as the standard for usable, well-designed, easy-to-integrate APIs. 

At the Cloudstock hackathon, I presented "Teach a Dog to REST," asking the question: where are all the elegant REST APIs we'd all hoped to see? While many claim REST has arrived, many APIs in the wild exhibit arbitrary, productivity-killing deviations from true REST. In this presentation, I start with a typical poorly-designed API and iterate it into a well-behaved RESTful API. Check out the presentation (with audio!) below for rules and advice on how to do REST right, including handling complex variations, pagination and API versioning. 

Slides + Audio: 

Teach a Dog to REST from Apigee on Vimeo.

Slides: 

RESCHEDULED: Netflix and the Second Coming of the Internet - Webcast Now Wednesday, December 15 »

Last week we experienced technical difficulties during the scheduled webcast on Netflix's API strategy. We apologize and have rescheduled the event for Wednesday, December 15 at 10:00 am PT / 1:00 pm ET. People who registered for last week's event do not need to register again, and new registrants can sign up here. A dial-in number for audio will be provided to all registrants in addition to the screencast and VOIP option. 

In Netflix and the Second Coming of the Internet: The Biz and Tech of the API Economy, Netflix's Daniel Jacobson, director of API engineering and Michael Hart, director of social engineering, will discuss the Netflix API platform and strategy. Here are some additional details:   

We'll hear about how Netflix's API strategy has evolved and discuss some of the top issues and best practices for API platform providers, teams and developers, including:

• Building an effective partner program
• Identifying the right API metrics to measure and drive the business 
• Reaching the hundreds of devices that define today's internet, from TV set-top boxes to gaming consoles
• Getting to mobile
• Rapidly testing application experiences 
• New technology like HTML5 and WebKit and where it fits
• API design best practices 
• Security, scale and management
• Developer experience 

And more! Hope to see you there for some great content and lively Q&A with the audience! Shoot us a note on Twitter if you have any ideas or questions you hope to see answered. 

Your API Sucks: Designing APIs Developers Will Love »

Yesterday at Cloudstock (the "Woodstock" for API and cloud developers), I presented "Your API Sucks," a talk about what great API design and developer experience means and how to get there. We've learned (oftentimes the hard way) that websites need great user experiences to survive, so why aren't more API providers applying the same principles to their APIs? In the slidedeck below, I look at why developers "hang up" on APIs, how to design a great API experience, and walk through some good and bad examples of API design approaches.

Videos from Social App Workshop- Mobile, Social APIs, Dev Tools and More! »

Last month we collaborated with Twilio and Heroku to put on Social App Workshop, an all-day coding fest for people making apps using the Twitter and Facebook APIs and other social services. 

There was a terrific line-up of speakers- including a one-two punch of mobile development, speakers from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, and bootcamps on using Apigee, Twilio and Heroku for social app development. Check them out below. 

Leland Rechis talks about taking Twitter to the physical world with mobile experiences, touching on service, notifications, versatility, integration and some great Twitter stats, along with the role of APIs in mobile:  

Mike Mayo from Rackspace talks about getting started with iPhone development and what you need to know to make the jump from web dev to mobile dev:

Jeff Lawson of Twilio kept the phone theme going with an intro to Twilio's powerful telephony API, bringing the power of SMS and voice to your apps:

We also had some great talks on building Facebook apps, with Facebook's Fred Fang giving an intro to the Facebook Places API and Morten Bagai of Heroku with a debrief on building Facebook apps on the Heroku platform:

Adam Trachtenberg from LinkedIn gave a presentation on the LinkedIn developer platform and how you can incorporate LinkedIn's professional network into your app with their API. 

Finally, Apigee's Sam Ramji shows you how to get started with the Facebook and Twitter APIs using Apigee's API Consoles and how to debug social APIs. 

Thanks to all the speakers and attendees and we hope to see you at an event soon! Hit us up on Twitter with ideas. 

This Week in APIs - November 6-12 »

Here's a wrapup of the best news as we head into the weekend. Stay safe out there kids. Hold the OAuth handshake and look both ways before crossing the streams.  

Twilio, the API that lets developers bring the power of telephony into their apps, raised $12 million in Series B funding. The money will go towards product development and more staffing. Congrats to Twilio and make sure to check out our new API Console for the Twilio API.   

Zend released version 1.11 of its PHP framework in GA. Notable is the addition of support for the Simple Cloud API, which provides a common interface to major cloud providers, allowing portability and helping developers avoid cloud lockin. Charles Babcock from InformationWeek has some great analysis here.  

Twitter announced that they will be ending support for XML on all streaming APIs on December 6. For now, this doesn't affect other Twitter APIs. Taylor Singletary gives details over at ProgrammableWeb.  

Developer Candy:

• PaidContent has a great article out on how TV is bringing new opportunities for developers with a range of APIs opening up and disrupting the industry. For example, PlayJam, a TV games distributor, will be launching an API in an upcoming beta. This is a space to watch and a must-read by Robert Andrews.  
• eBay announced that it has added Microsoft's OData protocol to its API. OData is a standard way to access and query data in an API, and has lately had a number of blue-chip implementations. What do you think?  
• If you're going to Dreamforce, or if you're going to be in San Francisco in early December, and you love APIs, check out Cloudstock- the Woodstock for cloud developers. Hang with the top API companies, code, compete, and hey- a gaming arcade. Best part? It's free.  

This Week in APIs - October 30-November 5 »

The best news in APIs this week. GET some! 

Alcatel-Lucent and GlueCon - a developer conference we love which focuses on APIs, cloud computing and other things that 'glue' the web together - is sponsoring a nationwide hackathon tour. Vote on where it should come over at ReadWriteWeb and maybe you'll get a chance to get Glue goodness locally. 

Facebook opened up its Write and Search APIs to Facebook Places - giving developers more functionality while allowing Facebook to collect more useful information in its databases. Write access means that API providers, their developers and app users can benefit from more data- something all providers should consider in a world where data IS value. 

Intuit launched an API for QuickBooks Online with OAuth and the ability to access a rich set of Quickbook data. It's still in beta but is publicly available to try, so check it out. APIs are bringing big disruption to traditional business software, making it more flexible, more open and more functional.  

Hot New APIs

• Google added a new Custom Search API and Translate API, to replace older APIs with greater functionality and ease of use. They also added some slick tools like the ability to create a team and work collaboratively with other developers. 
• Hey Gamers! Stribe opened up an API to connect to Guild Launch, which allows the 2 million-member Guild Launch community to access a social layer on top of the multiplayer gaming platform. 
• MSNBC's local news aggregator, EveryBlock, opened up a firehose API to give partners access to its content. The API delivers up to 24 hours of news items across EveryBlock's 16 cities- worth checking out, or into.  

What'd we miss? Let us know on Twitter. And don't forget to get your "I <3 API" stickers, totally free, anywhere in the world. 

This Week in APIs- October 2-8 »

Here's the best news in APIs for the week! And if you love this stuff as much as we do, make sure to check out Social App Workshop next Saturday, October 16 in San Francisco! Hack on the Facebook and Twitter APIs and learn some great stuff about mobile design and social integration for apps. 

LinkedIn launched a new Javascript API and upgraded their APIs to support JSON. These changes are designed to make their services as accessible as possible to developers. LinkedIn is quickly becoming a leader in the API space- one to watch! 

Ford announced that it will be releasing an API for its Sync in-car technology, which will let developers build hands-free apps. APIs are coming to the highways fast and this is a big move for Ford.  

David Linthicum has an article out in InfoWorld on three essential approaches to API design for cloud services. Great tips in here and a must-read for all you APIgeeks building out! 

New APIs and Fun Stuff to Play With 

• The World Bank has given its API for access to large financial datasets a makeover and is launching an app developer contest! The API will now have some great geo-coded data to play with. 
• More financial data fun! The New York Times has released version 3 of its Campaign Finance API. This version makes it easier to access the data. Lowering the barrier to entry for developers is key- great move. 
• Google announced that it will be launching an API for its goo.gl link shortening service. The API will let devs get the link shortening into their apps and have access to analytics. No word on timeline yet but we'll be staying tuned.