TelAPI - Another telephony API like Twilio

TelAPI is out of beta today.

TelAPI is like Twilio, a product for developers to easily create voice/sms apps. The features they offer is largely similar. Pricing also the same.

There is only one unique feature I see:

• Voice and audio effects

They support TwiML (Twilio proprietary XML syntax to instruct the call flow) AND also Restful web API. Cool if you don't have to know the TwiML.

Funny Gifs on API

http://apijoy.tumblr.com/ has a couple of funny Gifs on API, for both API consumers and producers. Visit for a laugh.

My favorites:

when i realize a competitor asked for an API key


what i feel when i use a REST/JSON API


When I find code samples in API documentation

Should API support Cross Site Scripting - CORS, JSONP?

One of the most requested feature for API provider would be support for CORS or JSONP.

This usually comes from client side developers using Javascript or Flash, which has a strict same origin policy (a form of security).

One of the very good guide comes from Apigee:

1.       Always make it possible for your API to return JSON.

2.       Support JSONP as much as you can (since you can't use it to upload data that doesn't fit in the URL) and leave it up to the users of your API to assess the security risks

3.       Support CORS by returning the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header on all API responses and implementing the OPTIONS verb as specified in the CORS spec.

4.       If you do the above your API will also support UMP.

5.       Return a crossdomain.xml and clientaccesspolicy.xml file from the top level of your API domain for Flash and Silverlight clients.

And looks like CORS is the trend. You could do JSONP too, but that was more of a hackaround. Youtube, Dropbox, etc are all implementing CORS.

Enable CORS!

API Design is about Naming

API design is about naming.

A lot of times, it is about choosing a right name, and making sure they makes sense and is consistent throughout.

It is like a little API language of itself, as quoted by Joshua Bloch.

Zapier, the ifttt for developers

Zapier provides a similar service to ifttt, that is to connect web services easily (via API, but without any programming knowledge).

For example, when you have a new Trello card, you can trigger to send a Twilio SMS.

I blogged about ifttt, and that an API might be coming. Zapier just done that.

I have tried adding my RESTful API to Zapier platform, and it took me just 1 hour. Our API wasn't even Perfect, and I took an additional minute to use their scripting API to make things work.

Awesome job, Zapier!

ChupaMobile Selling ZBarSDK for $16?

I covered ZBar earlier, which is an SDK for reading QR codes or barcodes. I thought ZBar is a free open source, governed by LGPL.

Then I stumbled upon QR Code Reader on Chupa Mobile, selling at $16. It is a obviously ZBar, renamed to that.

I heard of some bad things about Chupa.. some "developers" are uploading open source components and selling them in Chupa marketplace. So I wondered if ZBar is one of them.

Viddy API - Mashery Made, with Interactive Doc

Viddy is an iPhone app that beatify your video, kind of like Instagram for video.

Viddy API is done very nicely, made with Mashery, so you can use the same Mashery credentials to log in. Their interactive doc is also great to use, and seems like they implemented using Wordnik framework, as opposed to Mashery's.

You can also join their "Rule the Beach" developer contest, and stand to win $10,000 and chance to fly to meet them at a beach, I suppose.