Alex Barnett blog : SOAP, webservices, Google

Sync Google Calendar with Outlook and more with WideLens

alexbarnett — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 05:37:00 GMT

Google has just released a very cool utility (.exe download for Windows) providing users with the ability to synchronize their Google Calendar with Outlook.

Some nice features in their 0.9.3.0 release:

schedule the sync frequency: every x minutes
define directional flow: 2-way, and 1-way (either way)

A bit of a buzz going on about this...

Now, what if you could do the same over the web - no download, just use your browser (IE, FF, Safari)...? And not just Google Calendar <> Outlook, but others too...?

Well, it's certainly possible...First, watch this screencast I put together tonight (apologies for sound quality...done from home equipment):

About WideLens

A couple of weeks back Bungee Labs released a reference calendaring application, called WideLens, designed to show off some of the power of the Bungee Connect platform, from the kind of rich AJAX UI experiences delivered through to the high level of functionality developers can create by wiring up and integrating multiple web services and distributed web data sources into a single web app.

Video: WideLens User Experience
Video: Developer Overview

WideLens connects to Microsoft Exchange calendar, Google Calendar, Salesforce.com, Facebook, MySQL and iCalendar feeds, representing a variety of protocols and authentication schemes. MS Exchange is accessed through WebDav, Google Calendar through gData, Salesforce.com via SOAP, Facebook through REST and MySQL connectivity is based on client libraries provided by MySQL (integrated directly inside Bungee Connect).

WideLens is an uber-mashup.

WideLens connects to each of the sources in real-time, presenting the user with live data. With the exception of Facebook and iCalendar, users can create and modify events and those changes are immediately posted back to the source. MySQL pulls double duty, serving as both a WideLens native calendar source and as the persistence layer for all kinds of application data including user preferences and credential information for each service.

Developers: Have At it!

As mentioned above, WideLens has been released as a Bungee Connect reference application where we're encouraging Bungee Connect developers to customize the WideLens application as much as they want, deploy their own version of the app as their own app - to their own domain, at no charge, branded however they want and with whatever features / cuts / modifications / extended they want - the WideLens code is released under a BSD licence (read more here).

To get going with Bungee Connect and develop your own vision of what WideLens could do, sign up for your Bungee Connect account.

Video demo: REST Describe & Compile for WADL

alexbarnett — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 01:08:00 GMT

In March 2007, I naively asked if REST needs a WSDL and if yes, was WADL the one (Web Application Description Language). The conversation goes on, but I thought the video below and pointers might be of interest to those who have an opinion one way or the other.

The video Google Chalk Talk was published last week and shows Thomas Steiner demoing REST Describe & Compile, an online editor and a compiler for REST Web services based on SUN engineer Marc Hadley's Web Application Description Language (WADL).

(huh? video not available as embeded??? wtf? Here's the link to it)

"ABSTRACT

REST Describe & Compile is an editor and a compiler for REST Web services based on SUN engineer Marc Hadley's Web Application Description Language (WADL). REST Describe & Compile is implemented using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and is split up in two sub-apps:
REST Describe:
This component takes a (set of) URL(s) as input and tries to analyze the parameters regarding parameter types and Web service structure. It then generates a WADL representation for the given URL(s), represented in an editable, tree-like form. Typical input would be GET
http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService=0ZMFM7HPBYYY0SPERCR2=ItemSearch=Enterprise+Integration+Patterns=Books
or GET http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed...%7BuserID%7D/albumid/%7BalbumID%7D/photoid/%7BphotoID%7D?kind=kinds=0=1{userID}/albumid/{albumID}/photoid/{photoID}?kind=kinds=0=10

REST Compile:
This component allows for the WADL representation of a Web service to be "compiled" to working programming code in various languages (for the moment these languages are Java, PHP5, Python, and Ruby). The idea is thus similar to WSDL2Java, however in a more general WADL2Anything way.

The application can be tested online:
http://tomayac.de/rest-describe/latest/RestDescribe.html

There are some screencasts available on YouTube: http://youtube.com/profile?user=tomayac

Speaker: Thomas Steiner
Thomas Steiner works as a Customer Solutions Engineer from Barcelona, Spain, and has joined Google full-time only since October 1st. However, he has been with Google first as an intern and then as a temorary contractor since February 2005. During his time at Google, Thomas has created the Google APIlity PHP Library for the AdWords API, as well as the APIlity Agua Ajax application, which can be seen as an Ajax GUI for AdWords. From January 2007 till July 2007, Thomas did his Final Year Project with Google, where the REST Describe & Compile application was to be developed, hosted by Googler Patrick Chanezon."

Related, last week Assaf (a true web pragmatist) wrote in his post REST IDL, substance over style

"So far most of the suggestions I saw are turf wars in disguise, arguing for this syntax or that, but never for what it should describe. WADL so far looks like one of those best-for-my-platform choices, the constant mentioning of Microformats, which are not optimized for this task, is another danger sign.

It has to start somehow, but it better start with substance, not with style."

I agree with the last statement...

Now, I don't know if Assaf has seen the above video or not, and if not, whether the video would further sway him one way on WADL or not...anyone else have thoughts on what's in the video or tool demo'd, or WADL itself?

Podcast interviews - smart people in the world of the web

alexbarnett — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 15:41:00 GMT

One of the fun parts of my job at Bungee Labs is to partner up with Ted and interview some smart people in the world of the web. We publish these as a podcast series (the Bungee Line - podcast feed here) over on the BCDN blog.

If you have ideas about someone you think we should interview, let me know! We're focusing on topics we think web developers might be interested in the worlds of software as a service and web app development, in particular profiling web apis. Related topics are good too.

I've listed out below our most recent podcasts below...plenty more in the works (previous podcasts are listed here). Hope you like :-)

Alan Lewis on eBay Desktop and eBay APIs

"As product manager for eBay Desktop, Alan Lewis relies on the same web APIs that eBay makes available to all developers. In this edition of the Bungee Line, Alan tells us about what the eBay Desktop is, how it came about, and various details about eBay’s developer program and web APIs. We ask Alan about eBay’s position Oauth and on open source."

Toby Segaran on “Programming Collective Intelligence”

"Since the publication of his O’Reilly book Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications, Toby Segaran has become well noted for his ability to explain easily-understandable algorithms for the kind of deeply complex problems involved in social applications. Toby joins Alex and Ted to discuss some of the high-level concepts that he tackles in his book."

Jon Aizen of Dapper.net

"Jon Aizen joins Alex and Ted to explain how Dapper.net provides a no-fee tool for making almost any structured web site data accessible via a REST API. In a past life, Jon was involved in creating The Internet Archive. Jon also helps the Bungee Line introduce romantic intrigue into the podcast.

Punditry Alert! At the end of this show, Ted and Alex speculate a bit about Android, Google’s open source mobile device platform, the Apache License, and whether Robert Love is involved. Please consider this as another demonstration of Ted’s idiocy, brought to you by the Bungee Line."

Jeff Barr on Amazon Web Services (Part 2)

"In part 2 of our interview with Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr, Alex and Ted ask Jeff about Flexible Payment Service, virtual user group meetings in Second Life, the Startup Project, and pry at Jeff’s views of possible futures of technologies that developers might anticipate."

Jeff Barr on Amazon Web Services (Part 1)

"Developer evangelist for Amazon Web Services, Jeff Barr tells Alex and Ted about how he became a native Amazonian, his recent visit to “The Business of API’s Conference,” and a bunch of stuff on Amazon Web Services, including: Mechanical Turk, EC2, and S3. Additionally, Jeff explains the newly announced S3 Service Level Agreement*."

Podcast with John Musser of ProgrammableWeb.com

alexbarnett — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 16:38:00 GMT

A couple of weeks back John Musser of ProgrammableWeb.com joined me and Ted for a chat to discuss the state of web APIs and the API trends as he sees them.

We've now recorded the conversation and published as the first of a newly launched Bungee Line podcast series.

Topic covered include Facebook APIs, Amazon's recently launched Flexible Payment Service (FPS) , Google Base, Microsoft's Astoria and relational-data-in-the-cloud programming models and services, SaaS models and API SLAs, REST vs SOAP, "Closed is Still the Old Closed" and plenty more.

Thanks to John for his time.

6 Google APIs - the Lesser Known

alexbarnett — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 13:46:00 GMT

Adam Ostrow at Mashable has written up a non-technical introduction to Google's most popular APIs and links to some applications built using these.

His post prompted me to revisit Google's own Google APIs page this morning which lists some 36 services available to programmers. Although they are not all strictly APIs (some just provide RSS / Atom outputs) I thought I'd call out some of the lesser known Google APIs, six in all:

1. YouTube API

The YouTube video repository and user community are accessable via an API interface and RSS feeds (REST Interface or XML-RPC Interface) . Developers need a YouTube Developer Profile to gain access.

Example apps using YouTube API:

YouTube Coverpops
Creates a mosaic of video stills; mouse over the one you want to pop up and watch.
YouTube Badge Maker
Makes a code snippet that you can add to your website that shows stills from your six latest-uploaded videos.
Virtual Video Map
Integrates video location with Google Maps—click on the map marker to see a video from that location.
YouTube Video Gallery Plugin
Enables easy setup of video embeds and galleries into WordPress blogs, using video IDs.

2. Google Notebook API

Google Notebook is an online service (requires browser plugin) where you can store and organize clippings of text, images and links from web pages. The Google Notebook data API allows apps to view public notebook content in the form of Google data API ("GData") feeds such as request a list of a user's public notebooks, or query the content of an existing public notebook.

3. Google Search History Feeds - Feed your attention.

Not really an "API", but...you probably knew Google tracks your search history. Did you know you can track your "web history" via an RSS feed?

4. Google Checkout API

"Start selling on your website"

There are two types of Google Checkout implementation options:

XML APIs enable merchants to access all Google Checkout features. XML implementations are recommended for merchants who need to be able to digitally sign orders before sending them to Google. XML implementations are also recommended for merchants who want to offer coupons or discounts and for merchants who plan to integrate Google Checkout with their internal order processing and billing systems.
HTML APIs enable merchants to send information to Google Checkout and receive information from Google Checkout using name/value pairs rather than XML. HTML implementations are recommended for small merchants who do not want to generate XML. Merchants can not digitally sign orders in HTML implementations, so merchants who use this implementation should plan to review orders manually.

Example of companies using Google Checkout include the merchant Skates.com and ecommerce solution company Volusion (see this article at ecommerce-guide.com).

5. Google Mapplets

Google Mapplets are mini-apps that can be embedded within the Google Maps. This implementation has examples include Gas Prices, Crop Circles (!) and real estate search. "Mapplets" are Google Gadgets that can manipulate the map using Javascript calls that are derived from the Google Maps API - but beware, there are differences.

(update: Read/Write has just written up a post covering some uses of Mapplets here.)

6. Google Talk XMPP

Developers can integrate their own applications into the Google Talk (its instant messaging service) connect (federate) their service with Google's (allowing "service choice". The "XMPP" bit of Google Talk is used for voice signaling and peer-to-peer communication...in addition, Google plans to support SIP signaling in the future.

Today, the Google Talk service is built on the following open-source protocols:

XMPP - Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol; an IETF standard for instant messaging. XMPP was originally called Jabber, and the XMPP enhancement proposals were previously called Jabber Enhancement Protocols (JEPs). They are now called XEPs.
Jingle - A family of XMPP extensions that make it possible to initiate and maintain peer-to-peer sessions. Specific Jingle extensions support voice streaming, video streaming, and file-sharing sessions. (Watch out for the Google-specific non stardard XMPP extensions)

I could only find three mashups as examples using the Google Talk service (courtesy of ProgrammableWeb) - Gtalkr, Imified Instand Messenger Buddy and Jabber Google Map.

Alex Barnett Podcasts

admin — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 19:58:00 GMT

Alex Barnett Podcasts - I like podcasting, here are the links to them.

2008 - Podcasts for the Bungee Line

Nate Bowler, CTO of @Task, July 20 2008

@task (or AtTask) is a Utah-based tech company providing a comprehensive, web-based project and portfolio-management package delivered in both a SaaS and on-premise model with a very rich web API set. We talked with Nate about the evolution of their web services design and @task's future product plans in light of the market opportunities presented by the availability of the increasing number of 3rd party programmable web services."

Steve Bjorg, Founder and CTO of MindTouch, June 20 2008

"Prior to founding MindTouch and Steve worked in advanced strategies at Microsoft focusing on distributed systems and web services. We talked with Steve about MindTouch platform, its rich set of web APIs and the implications of a programmable wiki. But MindTouch goes beyond providing open source wiki collaboration and content management - it's delivering a leading edge application integration and development platform called MindTouch Deki. Michael Coté, an industry analyst with RedMonk (analyst firm) picked up on both the podcast interview and news of the latest release of MinTouch Deki."

Update from John Musser of ProgrammableWeb, April 14 2008

"ProgrammableWeb’s John Musser returns to the Bungee Line to give us an update on the API action of early 2008. Alex and Ted apologize for the unfortunate audio treatment to the Bungee sound in the previous episode, promising “never again!” In related news, check out the new intro music for our “Cool Web Tips” segment."

Developer Community Management with Jono Bacon, March 14 2008

"There are few developer communities as large and distributed as that of Ubuntu, perhaps the most popular brand of GNU/Linux distributions available today. Jono Bacon is the first official community manager for Ubuntu. He joins to tell us what he has learned in his 18 months of working with this vast and disparate community."

Social Design with Joshua Porter, Jan 30 2008

"Joshua Porter is a usability consultant, web designer, researcher and blogger specializing in the art of social design for the web whose experience includes five years at world-renowned User Interface Engineering. Josh’s blog (Bokardo.com) is a must-read favorite for UI and web designers and is finishing up his first book, to be published in the next few weeks (details below)."

Alan Lewis on eBay Desktop and eBay APIs, January 15 2008

"As product manager for eBay Desktop, Alan Lewis relies on the same web APIs that eBay makes available to all developers. In this edition of the Bungee Line, Alan tells us about what the eBay Desktop is, how it came about, and various details about eBay’s developer program and web APIs. We ask Alan about eBay’s position Oauth and on open source."

2007 - Podcasts for the Bungee Line

Toby Segaran on “Programming Collective Intelligence”, December 13 2007

"Since the publication of his O’Reilly book Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications, Toby Segaran has become well noted for his ability to explain easily-understandable algorithms for the kind of deeply complex problems involved in social applications. Toby joins Alex and Ted to discuss some of the high-level concepts that he tackles in his book."

Jon Aizen of Dapper.net, November 17 2007

"Jon Aizen joins Alex and Ted to explain how Dapper.net provides a no-fee tool for making almost any structured web site data accessible via a REST API. In a past life, Jon was involved in creating The Internet Archive. Jon also helps the Bungee Line introduce romantic intrigue into the podcast.

Punditry Alert! At the end of this show, Ted and Alex speculate a bit about Android, Google’s open source mobile device platform, the Apache License, and whether Robert Love is involved. Please consider this as another demonstration of Ted’s idiocy, brought to you by the Bungee Line."

Jeff Barr on Amazon Web Services (Part 2), October 7 2007

"In part 2 of our interview with Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr, Alex and Ted ask Jeff about Flexible Payment Service, virtual user group meetings in Second Life, the Startup Project, and pry at Jeff’s views of possible futures of technologies that developers might anticipate."

OAuth Podcast, with Chris Messina (aka FactoryJoe), Larry Halff (of Ma.gnolia) and Eran Hammer-Lahav, November 3 2007

"OAuth is a big idea, but is it a "solution looking for a problem to solve"? I don't think so. The problem for end users today is real, i.e. authorizing one service to access your data by another service for use by the first service, securely and with control. For developers wanting to develop apps and services that create value through the use of customer data stored on other services, there is no standardized means set of protocols to lean on. Instead, developers need to waste time learning a new way for their app to be authorized to do so for each service provider, having to jump through the various specific means and idiosyncrasies of each service."

Jeff Barr on Amazon Web Services (Part 1), October 18 2007

"Developer evangelist for Amazon Web Services, Jeff Barr tells Alex and Ted about how he became a native Amazonian, his recent visit to “The Business of API’s Conference,” and a bunch of stuff on Amazon Web Services, including: Mechanical Turk, EC2, and S3. Additionally, Jeff explains the newly announced S3 Service Level Agreement*."

Interview with Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! - Part 1 and Part 2, October 1 2007

Part 1

"Yahoo!'s Zimbra acquisition, the Yahoo! Mail Web Services APIs, Jeremy's take on the Business Week article discussing Yahoo! Openness, the fruits of Yahoo! Hack Days and the Internal Yahoo! Hack Days initiative, Yahoo! Geocoding API, Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library, Yahoo!'s AJAX API for Maps"

Part 2

"What Mash lets you do, Hadoop and Yahoo!'s formal involvement, the WebOS meme, something Jeremy feels strongly about :-) That was fun. Watch out for the discussion on "Meta-API Providers"... More APIs...From b2c APIs to b2b APIs, plus Pipes and democratizing the mashupshpere"

Interview with John Musser of ProgrammableWeb.com, September 19 2007

"Topics covered include Facebook APIs, Amazon's recently launched Flexible Payment Service (FPS) , Google Base, Microsoft's Astoria and relational-data-in-the-cloud programming models and services, SaaS models and API SLAs, REST vs SOAP, "Closed is Still the Old Closed" and plenty more."

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Older podcasts:

Search & Enjoy! (Podcast) The Power of Search and Recommendation, June 6 2006

"Speakers from Microsoft, Blinkx and Last.fm discussed issues of content regarding search, recommendation, the semantic web and the ownership of data in the Web 2.0 era at Content 2.0 on 6th June 2006."

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Microformats Podcast, March 31, 2006

"Here's a great podcast for you. All about microformats..."

Guests: Tantek Çelik, Dan Connolly and Rohit Khare. I think it's safe to say these guys know a thing or two about the web and microformats.

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OPML Podcast, March 10, 2006

"It's all about the draft OPML 2.0 spec and a few other things thrown in such as structured blogging, OPML tools, namespaces and microformats."

Guests: Joshua Porter, Adam Green and John Tropea.

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OPML and Reading Lists Podcast with Danny Ayers and Adam Green, Feb 12, 2006

"Last year Dave Winer started to push the idea of Reading Lists for RSS. More recently, the idea of Dynamic Reading Lists and Feed Grazing (or Grazing Lists / Glists) has been kicking around.

Its likely that Reading Lists support will become a common feature of Feed Readers / Aggregators."

Guests: Danny Ayers, Adam Green and Joshua Porter

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Attention podcast : Attention with Steve Gillmor, Feb 08, 2006

"Steve has been leading Attention conversation for some time now. In 2003 he, along with David Sifry (CEO of Technorati), initiated the attention.xml efforts and has since taken on the role as president of the non-profit Attention Trust."

Guests: Steve Gillmor and Joshua Porter

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MSN Search Champs podcast - Privacy conversation Jan 26 2006

"I attended the MSN Search Champs today....and what a day. Given the recent news and concerns around the data MSN Search, Yahoo and AOL provided to the government, there was a session set up where the 57 bloggers / online experts at MSN Search Champ were invited to discuss the topic with senior MSN management (Senior VP Yusuf Mehdi and VP Chris Payne)."

Guests: Fred Oliveira, Dion Hinchcliffe, Joshua Porter, Chris Pirillo, Thomas Vander Wal and Brady Forrest.

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Attention podcast: RSS feedreaders and aggregators Jan 22, 2006

"I asked two of the RSS industry's leading lights to join me for a call and share their perspective on the question of where Attention is going with respect to RSS feedreaders and aggregators: Nick Bradbury creator FeedDemon, part of Newsgator (Nick also developed Homesite - sold to Macromedia - and Topstyle) and Kevin Burton of Tailrank (also co-founder Rojo)."

Guests: Nick Bradbury, Joshua Porter and Kevin Burton

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Structured Blogging podcast with Marc Canter and Joe Reger, Dec 16, 2005

"You might have heard of the Structured Blogging initiative announced earlier this week by Marc Canter and others...there was certainly plenty of buzz and reaction to the news, but not all the reaction was rosy."

Guests: Marc Canter and Joshua Porter

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Identity Podcast with Kim Cameron and Dick Hardt, Dec 09, 2005

"A couple of weeks ago Joshua and I had a conversation about attention data (as podcasts).

In that conversation we kept touching on the topic of online identities and their management, so we thought we'd invite two pioneers of the identity space, Dick Hardt and Kim Cameron, to a podcast session and discuss how they saw the connections between these two related topics: attention and identity."

Guests: Dick Hardt, Kim Cameron and Joshua Porter

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OPML = Attention Data, Attention Engines and Tailrank, Nov 12, 2005

"Although we met briefly last week, Kevin Burton and I didn't manage to get enough time to discuss some of the things on our mind at the time, so we got a Skype call together and posted it as a podcast (.mp3, 42mb).

We focused the discussion around what he calls Meme Engines and I call Attention Engines, Tailrank (Kevin's latest project), OPML, RSS and Attention.xml"

Guests: Kevin Burton

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Web 2.0 podcast, July 01, 2005

"Richard MacManus of Read/WriteWeb and I had a Skype chat this evening and recorded the call Talked about Web 2.0, attention.xml, a bit about RSS, APIs and more."

Guest: Richard MacManus

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Attention podcast with Joshua Porter, Nov 26, 2005

"About OPML, Attention, and empowering people."

Guest: Joshua Porter

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