View Session Details and Presenter’s Bio.
I’m going to just start with the takeaways:
Developing relationships is key — with other developers, with IT teams, with content owners.
It makes doing your job easier.
It takes work … it’s worth it.
- COMMIT to the openness of your data
- Create RELATIONSHIPS with other developers on campus
- ENCOURAGE others to commit to open data
API: Application Programming Interface
An application programming interface (API) is a particular set of rules (‘code’) and specifications that software programs can follow to communicate with each other. It serves as an interface between different software programs and facilitates their interaction, similar to the way the user interface facilitates interaction between humans and computers.
Data Reusability
If you write software that is going to manage data, include interfaces to get that data out.
Fostering the API Culture
ND created a developers group – they meet monthly. It doesn’t matter what languages, frameworks, worlds they work in — they’re all facing the same challenges. Sometimes the theory behind solution from a different framework can be applied to your own project. By developing these relationships with developers across their campus, it has opened the doors for future collaboration on projects. The group is more aware of what data is AVAILABLE – and they are better able to realize how each units data might be able to be utilized by other departments.
Highlighted Tools
- mechanize.rubyforge.org – Mechanize is a ruby library that makes automated web interaction easy.
- nokogiri.org – An HTML, XML, SAX, & Reader parser with the ability to search documents via XPath or CSS3 selectors… and much more.
- RubyOnRails.org – An open-source web framework that’s optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity.
- GitHub.com – Social Coding.
- HTTParty – Makes http fun! Also, makes consuming restful web services dead easy.
- RDoc.rubyforge.org – Documentation from Ruby Source Files
- buddypress.org – Social networking in a box.
- test-unit.rubyforge.org – a xUnit family unit testing framework for Ruby.
- jQuery – The Write Less, Do More, Javascript Library.
- Regular Expressions – More powerful than Gandalf, Merlin and Dumbledore combined.
One reply on “Feeding the Beast: Fostering an API Culture #heweb11”
[…] LINK write-up | Slidedeck | Presenters: Erik Runyon and Jeremy Friesen of University of Notre Dame Higher-Ed sites should no longer survive as information silos. To prevent duplication headaches and to ease in data reuse, Notre Dame developers are writing API’s into each application we produce. You need the next 40 days of Student Life events in JSON or XML? We got that. Map data for the Golden Dome in XML, KML or JSON? Not a problem. You can even get your departments page content, news and databases in multiple formats. During this track, we’ll discuss the who, why and how this is done, and give several examples of how these API’s are being used to feed content to a variety of sites and devices at Notre Dame. […]