Tag: API

Google introduces Gmail API

Google is introducing the new Gmail API:

While IMAP is great at what it was designed for (connecting email clients to email servers in a standard way), it wasn’t really designed to do all of the cool things that you have been working on, which is why this week at Google I/O, we’re launching the beta of the new Gmail API.

This is somewhat expected:

Designed to let you easily deliver Gmail-enabled features, this new API is a standard Google API, which gives RESTful access to a user’s mailbox under OAuth 2.0 authorization. It supports CRUD operations on true Gmail datatypes such as messages, threads, labels and drafts.

As a standard Google API, you make simple HTTPS calls and get your responses in JSON, XML or Google Protobuf formats.

This is a nice bonus:

In contrast to IMAP, which requires access to all of a user’s messages for all operations, the new API gives fine-grained control to a user’s mailbox. For example, if your app only needs to send mail on behalf of a user and does not need to read mail, you can limit your permission request to send-only.

To keep in sync, the API allows you to query the inbox change history, thereby avoiding the need to do “archaeology” to figure out what changed.

They are also saying that it’s fast.  These are very welcome news indeed.

gargle – record web requests as they happen and turn them into reusable code in any programming language

gargle – record web requests as they happen and turn them into reusable code in any programming language

Reportr – Your life’s personal dashboard

Reportr – Your life’s personal dashboard

Reportr is a complete application which works like a dashboard for tracking events in your life (using a very simple API). With a simple interface, it helps you track and display your online activity (with trackers for Facebook, Twitter, GitHub, …) or your real-life activity (with hardware trackers or applications like Runkeeper).

The project is entirely open source and you can host your own Reportr instance on your own server or Heroku.

WordPress plugin repositories

WPTavern covers an interesting early stage development of WordPress plugin installations directly from GitHub source code repositories.  Here is a quick video on how it works:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCV_EomzXIU]

That got me thinking.

WordPress.org provides an API for plugins checks and updates.  WordPress software allows a plugin to overwrite the location of the repository.  But it still doesn’t seem to cover all the bases.  What if I want to install plugins from several repositories now?  Say – the official WordPress plugin repository, GitHub, and my personal or corporate repository.  There might be a way, but it seems tricky and non-standard.

I’ll look more into it, of course, but I think there should be a standardized way to setup WordPress plugins (or even themes) repository, and add it to a list of repositories that WordPress checks for updates.  Something along the lines of YUM and APT in Linux.