Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Items tagged webdevelopment, apis

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Does Amazon have a API for websites to utilize order and delivery fulfillment?

The Amazon Fulfillment Web Service used to handle this http://aws.amazon.com/fws/—but their site now says "Effective June 2012, Amazon Services will no longer support Amazon Fulfillment Web Service (Amazon FWS). All functions and services currently supported by Amazon FWS are currently available through Amazon Marketplace Web Service (Amazon MWS)." So I guess you want the Amazon Marketplace Web Service: https://developer.amazonservices...

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Are there any website thumbnail services that generate images in real-time?

http://url2png.com/ generates images on demand—you pass the URL directly to the service and it replies with a PNG image. The first load can take a few seconds (depending on how long it takes the originating site to serve up the assets etc) but they cache the generated images so future requests for the same URL will be served instantly.

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Are there any Meta APIs?

Embed.ly is a good example of this kind of API—it gives you one endpoint which wraps oembed APIs on dozens of other services (plus a bunch of custom scraping code). We use it as part of our video/slide embedding feature on http://lanyrd.com/

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What are some scalable OAuth and OpenID server implementations?

Any OAuth library should scale horizontally—I can’t see how any one library would be a better choice than another.

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What is the best way to maintain a API wrapper class across multiple languages?

1. Use JSON for your API. That takes away a lot of the necessity for an API wrapper, since it means you’re automatically returning native data types (hashes, lists, strings etc) for most programming languages.

[... 175 words]