dan.thoughts

Need to figure out closed/private API? Not a problem. Its always fun and challenging. There are few tools i use for that:

• Firefox LiveHTTP Headers extension
• Charles Web Debugging Proxy Application
• Proxie

Proxie is another project of mine, which i finally extracted from a script written a while ago and published it as a ruby gem.
I used it to track Grooveshark API and it worked out great. Here is the list of features:

• Bind proxy server to any port (default is 8080)
• Define output database. It uses SQLite3 by default, but you can extend it with any other types
• Sinatra-base web interface to browse all your collected data

Installation:

sudo gem install proxie

Start a server:

proxie -d DATABASE_NAME

After data collection just run:

proxie --web

The web interface runs on localhost:4567 by default.

Usage summary:

Usage: proxie [options]
    -i, --info                       Display this information.
    -p, --port PORT                  Listen on port (8080 default)
    -d, --db NAME                    Store results to database
    -w, --web                        Start a Web UI for databases
    -f, --flush                      Delete all local databases

Project on GitHub: http://github.com/sosedoff/proxie

ActiveResource is a perfect tool to consume API’s based on Rails. Most examples are pretty much simple and understandable. But i got really confused with the way to get a single resource.

Example use case

I was working with Unfuddle API recently, and i needed to fetch account information. So, basically, core url is like this:

http://subdomain.unfuddle.com/api/v1

And for account:

http://subdomain.unfuddle.com/api/v1/account

Resources:

# api base for all resources
class APIBase < ActiveResource::Base
  self.site     = "http://subdomain.unfuddle.com/api/v1"
  self.format   = :json
  self.user     = 'YOUR_USERNAME'
  self.password = 'YOUR_PASSWORD'
 
  # for debug purposes you can setup logger
  self.logger = LOGGER_CLASS
end
 
class Account < APIBase ; end
class Repository < APIBase ; end

To get all repositories you call as usual:

repos = Repository.all
# this will fetch URL_BASE/repositories.json

But account resource is a single resource, to fetch it you need to make a call like this:

# this will produce invalid url: /accounts
acc = Account.find(:one)
 
# and this is a correct way
acc = Account.find(:one, :from => '/account')

I wasted around 20 mins to figure out how to do that. This should be mentioned in the docs.

I really like public paste service – pastie.org. Too bad it does not have public API.
The most common user case for me – drop some files. 1 or 2 usually. So i have to copy and paste file contents into the form, select private and then send link to someone. Too many actions i think.

I decided to spend some time and create console tool and simplified api based on html extractions.

Source: http://github.com/sosedoff/pastie

Just install it:

$ sudo gem install pastie-api

And use it (multiple files are supported):

$ pastie file
$ pastie file1 file2 ... fileN

Also, API access:

require 'rubygems'
require 'pastie-api'
 
# Create a new private paste
p = Pastie.create('Test string')
 
# Create a new public paste
p = Pastie.create('Hello!', false)
 
# View paste details
puts "Paste ID: #{p.id}"
puts "Paste Key: #{p.key}"
puts "URL: #{p.link}"
puts "Raw link: #{p.raw_link}"
 
# Find existing paste
p = Pastie.get(1234567) # find by paste's ID
p = Pastie.get('abcdefabcdef') # find by paste's private code

Planning to add local pastes history and auto-paste from clipboard.