Hi, I'm Benjamin Horst. I fill a variety of roles here at SharedBook including product management and community relations. I'm filling in for Ann today since she posted yesterday in someone else's place.
We just enhanced a section of the SharedBook Web site catering to developers interested in our Open API. Here I'll describe some of the resources available on these pages to help you find what you need more quickly, so you can come to understand our system faster. This information should be helpful if you are interested in working with our API, or possibly entering the SharedBook Open API Challenge, which we introduced this week.
We provide a general overview of what can be done with the API on the Developers' home page. This is a good page to show to marketers and non-tech people, but if you're looking for the meat of the site, you can skip over it.
Another page will introduce you to the content types that appear in SharedBook's printed books. This page is called the "Starter Kit" and you will find it a good starting point if you're not deeply familiar with our online application and printed output.
Once you're a bit familiar with our terminology and the final form of our printed products, you'll be ready to hit our Methods documentation page. Each method is listed on this page under its general type, and you'll find its parameters spelled out on its own page linked from here.
Now, to really get an understanding of how to use these API Methods, you'll probably want to see some code. We've designed two pages for you. The first is our Resources page, containing API wrappers for PHP, Java and Python, with ASP coming soon.
The second is our Examples page, with actual components that we've developed using our API. Feel free to download these, inspect them, copy them and do whatever you need to learn from them.
To wrap up this quick review of our online support for API developers, we have started two Google Groups. For detailed discussions and technical questions, please join our SharedBook APIs group. If you'd like to follow a less-trafficked group to keep up with our general activities, join or visit the SharedBook Announce group.
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