Socialtext Bubble Bath Party

A couple of weeks ago many of my coworkers were sweating it out in Portland at OSCON where Socialtext announced that the socialtext code base is available for download by anybody, whenever they like.

This is cool and all, and I'm very proud of us for doing it, but the part I like most about the announcement is toward the end:

Socialtext also announced its new Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) Application Programming Interface to enable developers to integrate and extend Socialtext Open. Documentation is available at http://socialtext.net/stoss/?SOAP_API

This is yet another piece of the pie in opening up the system. Open code matters, but so do open systems and open data. The SOAP API is one phase in multiple phases of work happening to make it easy to get stuff in and out of Socialtext; to play in the growing pool of tools that take stuff from here and there, fiddle around a bit and put it there and here. This is what makes the internet fun and most useful. The last time I got this excited about remote API stuff for Socialtext the tools that were created never made it out to the world, mostly because the Atom Publishing Protocol wasn't quite there yet (it's damn close now) but also because the Socialtext side of the code wasn't out there.

The situation is different now: SOAP has been around for awhile; the Socialtext code is released; and the SOAP service is included in Socialtext Open. It's tweakable.

But wait, that's not all. SOAP is not everybody's favorite (certainly not mine). Coming early fall, a far more featured REST-based API (with at least some segment of APP support). You get the data so you can make up your own methods. Some good fun will come of this.

-- Chris Dent

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