Intro for PHP users

For you PHP users, Shelley Powers has an intro to using the NGAPI with PHP 4 and NuSoap. 

Postel's Law and the NewsGator API

There's a couple of support issues that have come up lately that we thought we should elaborate on for API customers.  Our web services are built upon Microsoft's ASP.NET platform, which has a couple of implications for client applications.  First of all, ASP.NET dispatches calls to web services by examining the SOAPAction HTTP header, which means your SOAP client must include that header in the request.  However, it turns out that a number of firewall products have started stripping "unknown" HTTP headers, which will cause ASP.NET to reject the request immediately.  So if you have a request rejected with an error message like "Unable to handle request without SOAPAction header", you're probably running into this situation.  There should be a way to configure your proxy to allow that header through, though you'll have to talk to the person responsible for that proxy server to tweak the configuration. 
The second issue concerns breakage in the API.  We want to make this much clear: NewsGator applications such as Outlook Edition, FeedDemon, and NetNewsWire are also API clients, so we're very concerned about breakage, because we have a wide base of deployed applications that would need to be updated in case of breakage.  The API Developer Token enforcement that will be loaded tomorrow is an exceptional case, because we had documented the requirement at the time of the official release date, we felt that we could lock down that enforcement, even though that could be a breaking change.  However, as far as existing methods, we are very concerned about breakage.  There are some non-breaking changes we can do to existing methods; for example, we can add a parameter to a method as long as we accept nulls for that parameter, and we can remove parameters from methods without affecting the client application.  However, we do have to be extremely conservative about our output formats.  Postel's law definitely is a prime consideration in any changes we make to the API.  If you do have some code that was working and suddenly breaks, please let us know immediately!  While we try hard to avoid breakage, we are still fallible.

API News

It seems appropriate to create a weblog for the NewsGator API.  We intend to use this weblog to let people know about updates in functionality, clarify points on the API, post additional samples, and highlight products using the API.  You can subscribe here.

We have one piece of news to report at this point; as some of you have pointed out, we ask you to submit an API Product Key with each API request, but we don’t actually do anything about verifying that you’ve done so.  What happened here is that this requirement was a fairly late addition to the API, so we didn’t actually start enforcing the product key until there was sufficient documentation about the requirement. At this point, the API signup process is formalized and presumably, everyone using the API has a product key and has read the documentation about this requirement, so we plan on loading an update to the services that, among other things, will reject requests that don’t include an API product key.  So, make sure your applications are up to date; at this point, we plan on loading this update on 18 October, 2005!

Test Post

Test post