Web APIsTuesday Talk - Imperial College - 26-02-

08Owen Griffin, Vodafone Group R&D

These slides are available on Google Docshttp://tiny.cc/D3HcM

- Quick Introduction- Mobile Development- Web APIs- Facebook Mashup- Other applications- Your ideas

This is who we work for

What's life like in R&D?

Summertime in Newbury

What's life like in R&D?

like these

APIsJavascript

Widgets

XHTMLXML

Ajax

SVGRuby on Rails

PHPJava

What do I do?

- Investigate Web Technologies

- Play with mobile devices

What do I do?

What do I do?

www.betavine.net

Member of the Betavine Development Team"An Open Community & Resource Website"

How many people own more than one mobile?

Zzzzz...

Questions

Has anyone done any mobile development before?

Questions

Has your application worked on more than 10 devices?

Questions

Mobile Development

- Worldwide mobile telephone subscriptions reached 3.3 billion- Thousands of different devices- Hundreds of different platforms- Too many choices for mobile development

Mobile Platforms- Windows Mobile- Symbian - Google Android- Apple iPhone- Java ME- Flash Mobile- Linux

Web Development

Easier than mobile development? Less devices, less platforms?

More developers and a larger audience?

Is the Web Browser a platform?

Web APIsAll the web sites mentioned before allow their users to access their information through an API.

There are 1000's of mini-applications on the web which make use of publically available Web APIs.

E.g.

http://www.flickr.com/services/api/

Allows you to:Search photosFind contactsTransform photosContribute

Uses HTTP withSOAPJSONXML-RPCREST

What can be done with Web APIs?

MashupsGoogleMaps mashups

Berkshire Floods1000's @ Google Maps Mania

Flickr MashupsRetrievrFastr

Social Network "Applications"Facebook applicationsOpenSocial

Services:Text Messages

Simple SMS messagesWAP Push links

Exchange of web linksApplication Trigger

Prompt applications to load on the phoneSupported formats:

JSONXMLRSSPlain text

Designed with mobile applications in mind. Simplistic - doesn't use a traditional authentication model. Read More..

Mobile Mashup Example

- Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, accounted for 5.17% of all UK Internet visits during October 2007

- So lets write a Facebook application...

Has anyone written a Facebook application before?

Uber Picture Poke

- Allows you to Poke your friends by showing them a photo of yourself on their mobile

- Requires both a Java Mobile MIDlet and a Facebook application

-The Facebook application uses the Betavine API to send an Application Trigger message to the MIDlet. The message contains a URL to an image. The image is downloaded and displayed on the mobile.

- http://apps.facebook.com/uberpicturepoke/

Uber Picture Poke - MIDlet

What we need to do:- Listen for messages- Download an image- Display an image

Lets just look at some code...

Has anyone written a MIDlet before?

Uber Picture Poke - FacebookThe Facebook application needs to:- List all of our friends which also have this application- Send an Application Trigger message to the MIDlet

Facebook API is extensive.. - http://developer.facebook.com/

The method we need is- Friends.getAppUsers

There is a helpful PHP library which interfaces with the API.

Facebook allows us access to all sorts of information, but.. does not let us find the users' mobile number.

Uber Picture Poke - Demo

Uber Picture Poke - FacebookSending the Application Trigger message:$url = "http://www.vodafonebetavine.net/api/send/trigger.plain?uaid=" . $uaid . "&dest=" . $mobile . "&message=" . $picture . "&port=" . $port;

$curl = curl_init();curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url);curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 4);$response = curl_exec($curl);$error = curl_errno($curl);$httpcode = curl_getinfo($curl, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);if ($error != 0 || $httpcode != 200) { echo $response;} else { echo "<p>Poking.. " . $mobile . "</p>";}

Uber Picture Poke - Demo

References

- betavine.net developer resources

- betavine.mobi

- Reuters - Global cellphone penetration reaches 50 pct

- Social Network Usage Statistics

- Flickr API

- Facebook Developers