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We have been exchanging some ideas with the guys at 37signals and we have come up with what we think is a very cool mashup contest. Here is what we came up with…
Developers, build a mashup application or mashup your existing application using both the Highrise API and the Lypp API and win stuff.
Best app:
- $3000 Apple gift certificate
- 20,000 minutes of call time from Lypp (approx value: $1800)
- 12 months subscription for a Highrise MAX account (approx value: $1800)
Runner-up:
- $1500 Apple gift certificate
- 10,000 minutes of call time from Lypp (approx value: $900)
- 6 months subscription for a Highrise MAX account (approx value: $900)
2nd Runner-up:
- $500 Apple gift certificate
- 5,000 minutes of call time from Lypp (approx value: $450)
- 3 month subscription for a Highrise MAX account (approx value: $450)
Application for entries: April 1 to May 1
Winners announced: May 15
We are giving you plenty of time to think about what you want to create using the Lypp and Highrise APIs. Some examples might be; Integrated Conference Calling within Highrise, Scheduled Calls, Click to Call Contacts in Highrise, Call-back Task links, just to name a few.
We will be posting more information about the contest in the next couple of weeks but that shouldn’t stop you from taking a look at the APIs right away. If you have any preliminary questions or comments please send them over: mashup@lypp.com or post them below.
One thing that isn’t mentioned anywhere (yet) is that the whole API works with JSON as well as XML. Some people (myself included) prefer to work with JSON, since its a little easier to read, and is often smaller than the equivalent XML payload.
Another nice thing is that the API supports Conditional GET, PUT and DELETE. Unfortunately you don’t see these often in web APIs, but they can be very useful when integrating with the Lypp API.
Conditional GET allows you to say “return something only if its changed since last time I saw it”. This is extremely efficient when nothing has changed, and adds virtually no overhead in the cases when something has.
Conditional PUT and DELETE basically allow you to update or delete something as long as it *has not* changed since you last saw it. Conditional PUT in particular is very useful, since it can act as a sort of optimistic locking system; making it so you can’t overwrite changes made by someone or something else.
I’ll be updating the Lypp API documentation to include more details, specifically how to actually perform a Conditional Request (don’t worry, its simple), and how to use the JSON API.
Would like to see those JSON examples.
I’ve been making requests by doing find/replace on the XML held in strings. (Not using Ruby.) It works, but seems backwards since my IDE will do code-assist on JSON.
Btw, I like your use of HTTP statusCodes for error messages. Very intuitive. Good use of existing functionality. I’m used to web services where the error message is in the response XML. (See bellsouth or Qwest’s electronic ordering web service responses.) Instead of parsing XML for an error code, I can check the HTTP status code… if it’s not 200, then I know something went wrong… no parsing. Quick n’ easy.