BlackBeltFactory REST Api

Dear Community,

During the past months, we've received several requests of members wanting to integrate their profile, belt, exam results, ... in their blog or website.
Therefore, we are currently considering opening our database via a kind of REST API limited to consuming our data : read-only, no security -> public data served only

In a first phase, we'd like to determine the requirements you have in term of data and format:

- What kind of format do you want us to support ? JSON, XML, RSS/ATOM, CSV, ...
- What kind of data do you want us to expose ? Single User Detail, Exam Results for a User, Congratulations per country/group, ...

In a second phase, when this is up and running we'd like your help to develop whatever widget (JQuery, Mootools, wordpress plugin, ...) is necessary to ease website/blog integration. Any idea so far of what could be developed ?

I'll set a wiki page up with instructions to consume the beta Rest service when this thread has received some feedback.

thanks for your help,

Nicolas

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 03/06/2010 05:12:38

Hi,

This feature is very useful for me.
I preffer the RSS syndication et the data which can be useful for me are :
successful exams (name & logo exam)
student comment (with mark)

Hello Alain,

thanks for your feedback!

The students eval/comments is a great idea to promote your coaching skills.
For the format, I guess people will need xml and json.

Nicolas

Hi Nicolas,

1- Latest belts for the last x days "available" per country
2- Top belts per country ordered by knowledge points
3- Top contributers per country ordered by contribution points
4- BBF profile (Photo, name, belt, coach level, coach rating)

The user should have the option to change his/her country from the profile.

Regards,
Ahmed

Thanks Ahmed,

any preference about the data/url format ?

Nicolas

I like this ones:
http://www.blackbeltfactory.com/DisplayBelts.wwa

But I would like to request that the images display something like "Java Brown Belt" or "Java Black Belt" under the belt drawing because many (specially here at Brazil) still don't know Java Black Belt.

Besides, it would be nice that we could have an URL for a transparent image with the design we select among some options.
Let's say something like that last option on the site with the orange border, our name, belt and no picture (or another chosen combination) as a single image so we could embbed in our sites by a regular html img tag.

I think most of us could use something like this on our blogs and sites.
Check mine for instance: http://sites.google.com/site/pplupo/home

(I know that Brown belt is no longer the highest available but I am about to reach black so I am postponing the updated image).

this should be evaluated, because we use Drupal for our JUG website, the current JS which return HTML is enough.

Hi Ahmed,

the idea is to first determine what data/format are needed then we hope the community will share their JavaScript widgets to show the data.

Nicolas

Hi,

I develop Facebook applications and from my point of view the best format would be JSON.
Why?
Facebook API uses two formats: JSON and XML, so both would be good, but it is much easier
to parse/process JSON format in a Web-based rich client.
With JSON there is no need to process the XML (what is done usually on the server-side).
I use Google Web Toolkit (GWT) which has quite robust JSON handling, while XML parsing is in my opinion more complicated.

regards
Dawid

Hi guys,

I've deployed a first release of a REST API on our production server.

The supported 'routes' are :

/users/{userId}{format}
/coach/{userId}{format}
/users/{userId}/exams{format}
/coach/{userId}/exams{format}
/coach/{userId}/evals{format}

with

userId = the Id or nickname of the user
format = .rss or .json

full url example:

http://www.blackbeltfactory.com/rest/users/kaz.json

or

http://www.blackbeltfactory.com/rest/coach/9777114/evals.rss

Suggestions are welcome,

Nicolas

PS: Given the comments on this thread, I think we will focus on the Json format instead of Rss

Hi,

Sorry for my English, it's not my mother tounge.
I have a problem with /users/{userId}/exams{format} route. When I want to parse http://www.blackbeltfactory.com/rest/users/12879288/exams.json file with PHP json_decode() function I get NULL. I checked JSON file output with validator. It returns some errors in date section.

regards,
Tomasz

Hi Tomasz. Thank you for reporting. Nicolas is on vacation. He will reply you in a couple of weeks.

Hi Tomasz,

quotes are missing around the date, this will be fixed in the next release (next week).
The date format will be ISO8601.

thanks for pointing this

Nicolas