asked 2010-04-15 20:32:12 -0500

11009 ● 50 ● 84 ● 182
http://askbot.org/

updated 2010-04-15 20:33:15 -0500

Hello, could you share some ideas - what are the most valuable features in that you'd like to see in the API for a Q&A forum?

Thanks!

delete close flag offensive retag edit

3 Answers

Sort by » oldest newest most voted

answered 2010-05-22 04:12:06 -0500

jens
96 ● 2 ● 4 ● 4

For a read only API the Yahoo! Answers API

probably is a good start:

questionSearch
getByCategory (getByTag in askbot)
getQuestion
getByUser

A read/write API could encourage a android or iPhone app developer to write a mobile client on top of that. Sth. like

questionSearch (to check if it was already asked),
authenticate,
postQuestion,
getQuestion (for the answers) and
vote/rate/choose best answer

link publish delete flag offensive edit

Comments

Hey, thanks. This is a really good pointer. Evgeny ( 2010-05-22 12:43:15 -0500 )edit

What is the status of API support for askbot ?

kirantpatil ( 2012-12-29 05:12:54 -0500 )edit

answered 2012-11-05 03:31:07 -0500

pajju

473 ● 7 ● 8 ● 21
http://ninjaas.com/

updated 2012-11-07 15:27:30 -0500

Different Users, communities have different API requirements, in the way they want to expose their resources. So there can never be a 'one fit all' solution from askbot side. Also an askbot site that runs askbot will have lots of Rich Data overtime, which can be monetized by exposing a solid RESTful API. And only the Askbot site owners will best know - what to and what NOT to expose, to other developers and partners.

So in my view, the API for Askbot, should be very loosely coupled, like a managed API server. It is good, if the design pattern encourages such things. If you think as a network engineer, a managed API also serves as a load balancer to a larger extent, intelligently cache same requests (doing things like memcached for API requests). This will not slow down and affect the Site APP server anytime.

We need all such good design patterns for the API and this is a huge topic to debate. We might also need things like Webhooks.

Please see all the managed API companies - APIgee, emergentone.com and Heroku's managed api's to setup an externally managed API. They do API management for any DB. In short - they give and manage an API server for your APP. So its super easy to expose, control (authorize, manage resource access control) and also scale your API server on more requests. Do check in detail the services they all offer, you will appreciate my points of view.