Soocial blog

In a series of blog posts we’d like to give an update on all the things we’re planning for this release. The second in this series is about the biggest feature request from our alpha testers: an API. We also made a Facebook Application in order to test our API. This introduction will give you sneak peak of the API and Facebook features.

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In a series of blog posts we’d like to give an update on all the things we’re planning for this release. The second in this series is about the biggest feature request from our alpha testers: an API. We also made a Facebook Application in order to test our API. This introduction will give you a sneak peak of the API and Facebook features.

API and Facebook Application

One of the most wanted features in our survey is to add an API. So we have. The API allows developers to create functionality for their users to hook into their own contact information. A good example of this is the Facebook Application we developed as part of testing our own API. With this app, Facebook users can view, edit, add their contacts from within Facebook. We hope to be expanding the functionality in the near future to add for easy adding of Facebook friends to your Soocial contacts but we feel that might be too complex for now. The awesome thing is that having an API means the contacts you have on your phone can be used in any third party app. First a bit more about the API.

Soocial API

The Soocial API is implemented as Vanilla XML over HTTP. All clients that access and use the API are seen as another device in the Soocial ecosystem. The API is a RESTful service. All data is available through the API as a resource to which can be referred using a unique identifier. It responds to a number of the HTTP methods, specifically GET, PUT, POST and UPDATE, and all responses from the API are in a simple XML format encoded as UTF-8. Authentication is realised using Basic HTTP authentication. Your Soocial.com username and password can be used as the authentication credentials for the API. You can edit pretty much all the data of your contacts in Soocial via the API. Some limitations do apply: a user allows a full GET but only allows a PUT for the name field and devices only allow GET.

Using Rails goodies

Active Resource is a thin but powerful wrapper around RESTful services exposed by Ruby on Rails. It will be part of Rails 2.0 but until then you can get it with ‘gem’. Inspired by 37 Signal’s Highrise wrapper, we’ve put together a small ruby wrapper for the API which sets up the ActiveResource models for you to play with in an IRB session. When the beta goes live this will be available as an extra help to developers wanting to use our API.

Facebook Application

As can be seen in the screenshot above, we’ve got a Facebook Application ready to go at beta launch. Basic CRUD actions on your contacts are possible – that is viewing, editing, adding and deleting. The contacts available in the Facebook Application are the same as in Soocial, it is seen as another device (as mentioned above). There is (unfortunately) no integration with Facebook friends, we’ve decided to wait until we have filters and/or groups implemented. Otherwise the amount of contacts in your Soocial will explode – something we’re trying to prevent.

Hassle-free

We’re very excited about this release, and we believe the API will enable developers to use Soocial’s service to add extra value to their users. We hope that it will provide a big boost in making your contacts hassle-free.