Question thread #60

[pauamma]

It's time for another question thread!

The rules:

- You may ask any dev-related question you have in a comment. (It doesn't even need to be about Dreamwidth, although if it involves a language/library/framework/database Dreamwidth doesn't use, you will probably get answers pointing that out and suggesting a better place to ask.)
- You may also answer any question, using the guidelines given in To Answer, Or Not To Answer and in this comment thread.

Comments

[zoe_de_la_luna]

Hi,
I've been learning Xojo (basically the Mac version of Visual Basic), and I'm interested in trying my hand at writing a Dreamwidth client for the Mac that is compatible with MacOS High Sierra.

I haven't coded since high school (I'm a lot older than I look), so consider me a complete beginner.

My question(s) is... Is there an API available for Dreamwidth?
Or something like a beginner's guide to understanding how to communicate with the server programmatically?

Sorry to be such a n00b. But we all gotta start somewhere.
Thanks!

[pauamma]

Hi, and welcome to Dreamwidth development.

This sounds like a new project, so I would consider the new API we have in development, discussed in https://dw-dev.dreamwidth.org/200615.html and https://dw-dev.dreamwidth.org/201612.html. I'm not sure that we have anything right now that qualifies as beginner documentation, but such will be written in due course (perhaps with your help), and I'm sure that if you have questions, someone here or on https://dw-dev.dreamwidth.org/201612.html will have answers.

[zoe_de_la_luna]

Thank you so much! I'm happy to contribute to beginner documentation as I progress on this.

[momijizukamori]

Hello :D! I'm the person that's ended up spearheading the new API project. The nice thing about the new API is that it's a JSON-based RESTful API, which is a fancy way of saying that it mostly functions the same way interacting with a website does, just that the server returns data in a format that's easy for computers to parse into useful bits. I don't know how familiar you are with HTTP requests and responses - if you're not, this set of intros from Zapier looks pretty solid at the basics. We will probably want some intro docs of our own, particularly once I sort out authorization properly (right now it just uses the same browser cookies the normal login process does), and right now the api docs are probably not as descriptive as they could be (and currently not available; I shuffled stuff around to work on some patches) - if you take note of stuff that's confusing/missing, that'd go a long way! Being the one implementing everything, I know how it works, so it's not always obvious when I missed explaining something properly.

[zoe_de_la_luna]

Thank you so much! This is super helpful!
Especially the bit from Zaper. I will be sure to note anything I come across as this progresses.

[mdlbear]

Has anyone tried testing the new API with curl? For some reason I enjoy writing shell scripts, and I think a command-line client written in bash would be awesome.

[momijizukamori]

It's not something I tested, but it's 100% possible, though it'll be a lot easier once we switch to API keys instead of cookies!

[momijizukamori]

Awesome, glad I could help! And yeah, I did a quick search for API intros and that came up, and on a quick skim it looked to be a really good break-down of interacting with the type of API I'm working on.