#mashape

APIs are happening. Driven by the apps and mobile connectivity explosion on one end, and enterprises gearing up for faster, more effective way to do business on the other, APIs are becoming the lifeline for the internet powered economy. The gold rush into the API marketplace does not mean that every API is destined for success - there are a plethora of factors involved on top of just converting your business into HTTP packets. Making the API discoverable, developer friendly, secure and scalable are each critical to engage consumers of your API. After initial investment of effort to design for success, supporting a thriving community around the API is ongoing work.

If you're a small startup with the objective of getting to market quickly and efficiently, solving for these needs can be overwhelming. Enter API Management solutions (also known as API Proxies, your API’s best friend). At Rillate, we decided an API proxy was what we needed to bring our verification API to market. With the following checklist in hand, we set out to evaluate offerings in the API proxy market:

discovery: API marketplace gives our API  additional visibility in front of developers ready to consume APIs.

monetization: building pricing and billing into our product is a nontrivial effort. We wanted to be able to use external provider for those to speed up our time to market.

consumability: features like built in documentation and testing, client libraries to minimize the zero to production time for the developer.

support: efficient way for developers to communicate with us about any questions or issues.

scalability and stability: features like rate limiting, uptime and latency monitoring at proxy level.

security: a core feature for API Proxy, we looked to make sure our design meets standards so developers don’t have to re-learn and re-implement authentication code.

analytics: anything worth doing is worth quantifying.

cost: last but not least, we wanted all the above features at a cost within the stage of our business

The quest for API began with identifying the key players. We found this API comparison article by API Evangelist aged quite well and it served as a pretty accurate starting point to narrow the candidates.

Mashery is the best known and most mature API proxy out there, trusted by enterprise market and is well suited for the needs of large scale, sophisticated business by offering high availability, on-premises and cloud deployment options, personalized API certification process and guidance on best practices. For our set of objectives, this was a higher point on features and cost that we looked for.

Apigee's offering is as solid and diversified, with similarly rich featured enterprise support. They do fantastic job advocating the API economy, promoting best practices and reaching out to developer community. Apigee has tiered services and pricing structure, and we realized that monetization capability comes in a price range that wasn't yet feasible for us.

3scale is set apart by its architecture - API management is done by NGINX proxy deployed alongside your app. We liked the idea of simplicity, greater control, flexibility and improved performance that this approach enables, and we loved the open source aspect of the technology. Monetization feature with clear pricing structure was also a plus. Operational overhead of installing and managing additional components in our production environment ended up being a deterrent.

Apiary, a relative newcomer, has attractive clean philosophy of iterative API design with automated testing and documentation generation, based on their emerging standard of API Blueprint. They're doing great work and are definitely worth another look in the future. However, our requirement of monetization feature had us continue our search.

Mashape ended up being our final choice. We found it to be on par with others when it came to developer centric features such as the developer portal and communication tools, fully interactive API documentation pages. Mashape biggest differentiator is its developer community and API Marketplace, which aligned with  our objective to have our API discoverable by developers who need it. Setting up API endpoints was easy and intuitive and the resulting documentation/test page was easy to use - we soon found ourselves preferring Mashape's API Test/Documentation page to our internal tools for API testing. Mashape provides open source Unirest libraries in most popular languages enabling the developers to integrate our API in just a few lines of code. 

A huge factor in our decision was how Mashape approaches monetization: we found it to be aligned with the needs of an early stage startup like ourselves:

no upfront cost: Mashape takes a cut of the price paid by developer to API provider. It costs nothing to start having your API consumed via Mashape.

flexible pricing structure: Mashape's price plans are oriented toward straightforward subscription pricing model; but Mashape also gives the API provider greater control over the cost billed for each call. This is done by setting the 'billing' header on the response to the desired amount, allowing the application to own the billing logic, but still delegate execution  to Mashape. Our choice of pricing structure is closer to pay-per-use model, with a friendly twist - the caller only pays for checking someone's school enrollment if the call returned a positive response. Not only there's no upfront subscription cost to pay, we removed the upfront risk of integrating with us (such risk could come from unknown distribution of end user data, running pilots or exploratory projects, A/B testing). Even with the pricing structure so different from the typical subscription model, we were able to make it work with little code added to our backend.

Last but not least, we felt great cultural fit with Mashape - our questions and requests for support were answered quickly and with great deal of knowledge and understanding. It is obvious Mashape is still growing and adding features, but they got the key values right.

Hello World,

Thank you so much for your interest in our blog. We here at Rillate are proud to announce our first verification product that will allow developers to verify their users' stated affiliation to over 4,500 academic institutions in the United States.

When Natalya and I launched Rillate in February, our biggest challenge was putting together a reliable dataset with wide coverage. Today, through direct partnerships with organizations and institutions, the data used for your verifications is the same one used for graduate school applications across the United States. Whether it is affiliation to a public, private or professional institution, there is a 98% chance we can vouch for it.

To make it easy to get started, we have partnered with Mashape to publish our API. In the meantime, we would love to hear from you! Let us know what you are working on or just say hi. We are available anytime at [email protected].

Best,

내가 만든 PS4 NEWS 앱에 넣고싶던 기능 중 하나가 metacritic 점수 정보였다. 근데 막상 넣어보려고 하니 html 파싱을 해야해서 귀찮음이 몰려왔다. 게다가 난 아예 서버 없이 google docs만으로 정보를 구축하고 있기 때문에 뭔가 복잡한 파싱이 필요하다면 작업 자체가 난감하기도 했다.

아, 그러나 세상은 아직 살만하구나. mashape 라는 서비스에 어느 멋진 분이 metacritic api 를 만들어 제공한다. 간단히 github 계정을 이용해 서비스 계정을 생성하고, api key를 만든 다음 호출하면 json으로 metacritic 점수 정보가 딱~! 들어온다.

We love hacking and hackaton. And we started musiXmatch from there. Here a Guest post by @mutlu82 and @frasiocht, 2 hackers who built an awesome project based on musiXmatch API

Tuner.io was created over 12 hours at a hackday held by the great team at Mashape. It's a website that looks at the lyrics of songs in the Billboard top 100, counts words and overall sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) and then organises the most popular results using the APIs available from Musixmatch and Text Processing. We focused on some key areas such as profanity and love, hoping to draw some conclusions from the data about what type of songs make up the top 100.

The idea came from a discussion about 'What really makes up a rap song these days?" and whether it was possible to show common elements to rap songs automatically. This idea then expanded into looking at the entire Billboard Top 100 and using all this generally overlooked data to analyse songs in a new way. It's really interesting take on music, but we're only scratching the surface.

There's some real potential with Tuner.io, especially if we add the ability to show trends over time. For example how much has profanity increased in songs over the last 20 years? Have songs been more positive or negative during the financial crisis? What type of song is more likely to get into the top 10?

Now for the technical part:

Tuner uses the MaShape API distributer to utilise a number of services to achieve it's goals of Lyrical sentiment analysis. Initially we make a call to Musixmatch to retrieve the current billboard top 100. (The billboard top 100 changes every Thursday at 12:00 EST, Tuner will update weekly to reflect this).

Once we get all these tracks we then do separate calls for each to retrieve the lyrics (again from Musixmatch). We also use the Text Processing API service to gather the sentiment associated with each song. This API returns Negative, Positive and Neutral values associated with the lyrics. While this is going on we explode the song lyrics and sort them against preselected values representing Profanity, Love, Sex and Materialistic features. The results are then presented as an HTML page containing integration to Spotify's Javascript hooks and additionally their pop up player.

Voila!

We had a lot of fun making Tuner.io and can't wait to take it to the next level, thanks to all the guys at Mashape, Musixmatch and Text Processing for your support!