ReadWriteWeb

Today, Wordnik officially announced Swagger, a specification and framework for building interactive API documentation and sandboxes. The Swagger UI allows developers and non-developers to interact with an API and see how the API responds to different commands and parameters. It's based on the technology that powers Wordnik's own interactive API documentation and can work with both JSON and XML-based APIs.

You can find it in GitHub.

Get Ready for a Twitter vs. Google Plus Fight for Developer Love

Like to hack on Twitter feeds, streams and APIs? Then there's good news for you this morning. Twitter has acquired a small startup company called Bagcheck, but the real score in the deal was bringing co-founder Sam Pullara onto the team. Pullara was previously the Chief Technologist at Yahoo where he lead many of the best programs at that beleaguered but technically awesome company.

Yahoo Pipes, Yahoo Query Language, Yahoo Search BOSS and other inspiring technologies that enabled hackers all around the web to roll out sophisticated mashups powered by Yahoo's backend were championed for years by Pullara. Not everyone liked him, but people who love to experiment with data have got to be excited about his coming to Twitter, the world's most promising stream of publicly available, semi-structured, real-time social data. Twitter's relationship with developers has been troubled at times, but Pullara's joining the team is the latest step the company has taken to make amends with its developer ecosystem.

The developers of two of the most influential open-source Web browsers are working together on a feature that should make Web apps play together much more nicely. As we covered on ReadWriteHack yesterday, Google's Chromium engineers announced that they're working with Mozilla on a framework called Web Intents, the brainchild of Google developer Paul Kinlan. Firefox announced its project last month.

Web Intents, based on an existing capability in Google's Android mobile OS, will let Web apps express a simple call for an action, like 'share' or 'edit,' which receiving apps will be designed to use, without either app needing to have specific knowledge of the APIs of the other. This way, instead of having to code for each specific Web app one might want to access, developers can just use these simple requests, which will be built into the browser. The Chrome and Firefox teams are each building this functionality for their own browser, but they're combining their proposals to use a single API for Web app developers to reach both platforms.

In a blog post, Google software engineer James Hawkins revealed that the company is working on a system called Web Intents in which it will enable Chrome users to pipe data between different Web applications much the same way Android users can share data between apps. The idea is to create one API that various Web applications can all use to pass data back and forth without a need for each one to be designed to work with the other apps.

This week was finals week for the summer semester at Washington University in St. Louis, and one event that I regularly enjoy attending is the iOS programming class final presentations. Being the summer term, it was a very compressed schedule: the students, some of whom are older and have full-time day jobs, have about a month to learn how to use the various Apple tools, spec out and code their apps.

I've gone to several of these final presentations in the past (here is a report from 2009) and I continue to be impressed with what the students come up with. Sure, there are the usual mishaps: code that doesn't compile, or last-minute hacks to add one more feature or tweak a particular icon to display properly. But the class is a great arena for preparing these senior computer science majors with what they are going to have to face in the real world.

Mashery recently open-sourced a new interactive API documentation system called Mashery I/O Docs. It's available from Github.

I/O Docs enables developers to experiment with API calls from within the documentation. You can see it in action at Posterous and Wordnik Alibris and Klout (correction: the Posterous and Wordnik APIs were the inspiration for I/O Docs, but don't use I/O Docs).

As IT becomes more consumerized and cloud computing becomes more of a reality, the app itself is becoming almost irrelevant across enterprises. As the desktop PC model has morphed into the network, and as the network has become just another extension of the Internet, it is all about the API, the ways that apps talk to each other that has made them front and center to today's corporate computing infrastructures.

SAP announced today that several of its enterprise products will soon gain new features for visualizing location data from Google Maps. SAP BusinessObjects Explorer and Streamwork were specifically mentioned. SAP expects these features to be available in both on-premise and hosted versions of its applications.

Today Microsoft announced that users of Google Health, scheduled to be shut down on Jan. 1, 2012, can send their data to Microsoft's competing HealthVault service. In the closing paragraph, Microsoft also pitches developers to migrate their Google Health projects to HealthVault.

Klout's API served over 2 billion API calls in June, according to the company blog. Klout launched its API before it even launched its website. But this number pales in comparison to Twitter's 15 billion calls per day. In fact, Twitter serves more API calls per day than both Google (5 billion per day) and Facebook (also 5 billion per day) combined.