2013/01/10 by Georges Gouriten, Gouriten, Georges, Pierre Senellart +1
Computer Science · Decision Sciences · #D.3.2 #Data Quality and Management #FOS: Computer and information sciences #H.3.5 #Semantic Web and Ontologies #Service-Oriented Architecture and Web Services #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI) #Software Engineering (cs.SE) #cs.SE #cs.SI
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1301.2086
Presented in WWW 2012 Developer Track, April 18-20, 2012, Lyon, France and published in WWW no companion proceedings (url: http://www2012.org/proceedings/nocompanion/DevTrack_039.pdf)
arxiv created 2013/01/10 · openalex publication_date 2013/01/10 · arxiv updated 2013/01/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
With the growing success of the social Web, most Web developers have to interact with at least one social Web platform, which implies studying the related API specifications. These are often only informally described, may contain errors, lack harmonization, and generally speaking make the developer's work difficult. Most attempts to solve this problem, proposing formal description languages for Web service APIs, have had limited success outside of B2B applications; we believe it is due to their top-down nature. In addition, a programmer dealing with one or several of these APIs has to deal with a number of related tasks such as data integration, requests chaining, or policy management, that are cumbersome to implement. Inspired by the SPORE project, we present API Blender, an open-source solution to describe, interact with, and integrate the most common social Web APIs. In this perspective, we first introduce two new lightweight description formats for requests and services and demonstrate their relevance with respect to current platform APIs. We present our Python implementation of API Blender and its features regarding authentication, policy management and multi-platform data integration.