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An Intro to an API

Building a Digital Sandbox to Play In

Placewise Media logo
Placewise Media (formerly Mallfinder Networks) is a fourteen year-old company that, for much of that time, provided web services for shopping centers and property management companies. That’s terribly boring. It’s their current transition into a media startup of the multi-screen era that is intellectually sexy to me (that, and I have to enter a code in the elevator just to get to the offices; I'm a sucker for that James Bond stuff). In the startup biz this is called a pivot: growing a $1.5 million-a-year web services company into a $40 million-a-year diversified suite of shopping applications.

Those shelves are for all the money we'll make. Right now they're filled with hubris.

I joined Placewise as a Senior Application Developer after a stint as ColdFusion and Flex programmer at Cricket Communications because of their unique opportunity. The people here recognized they were sitting at a potentially profitable confluence of data:

  • shopping center events
  • store deals
  • product info
  • shopper brand interest displayed via social networks
  • articles on purchasing trends

Their first attempt to munge together these elements has been Shoptopia. Shoptopia is a social network centered around user’s purchasing intent and shopping center availability. Initially built in Drupal, it’s since grown into a custom PHP-scripted framework that supports alternate presentations of content depending on the store mix at a mall.

While the traffic and interactions with the browser based product has been positive my role is to help extend the site’s value to the numerous “other” screens. This includes everything from smart phones to tablets (and beyond). I’m working to compartmentalize pieces of essential functionality into handy, dandy web services TO FEED THE SCREENS.

Who doesn't love a Monday morning video conference with the Snake Mountain branch?

(It is now time to drop acronyms like Benjamins in a rap video.)

While I did have previous enterprise experience developing SOAP based APIs (ColdFusion makes this ridiculously easy) my current Placewise implementation is REST based. The barriers to entry for new consuming applications are just so much lower. But ease of consumption doesn't mean the process is A-OK. To build this I've been doing things like using a tokenization process for access, securing with basic authorization over HTTPS, clarifying between HTTP POST and PUT, returning tidy JSON, and more. The issues that I've been concerned in this first iteration have been:
  • security
  • rate throttling
  • detecting accidental double postings
  • rudimentary caching of essential assets
  • bandwidth efficient, mobile network friendly conversations

How do we accomplish these things? Queue the serialized content! More on that in subsequent posts.

Matthew Reinbold - Sep 06, 2011
3700 Quebec St Unit 100-205, Denver, CO 80207 - (720) 263-0090
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