Give SOAP a REST (if you want to)

Recently, we’ve been working on some very interesting new features for our developers. In order to simplify development, we’ve built out REST web services for our SiteCatalyst and DataWarehouse APIs! Under the same theme of simplifying development, we’ve built out a Web Services Explorer that provides an environment to easily test API calls.

Let’s rewind a bit and give a quick overview of these things…
“REST (Representational State Transfer) is an approach for getting information content from a Web site by reading a designated Web page that contains an XML file that describes and includes the desired content.” -from SearchSOA.com

Other than being wordy, that means that REST services are a way to interact with APIs using a metaphor of downloading, modifying, and uploading files. There are different levels to which APIs adhere to this metaphor. Some are very strict, where each interaction is simply the exchange of a resource, some are more similar to remote procedure calls (RPC). Omniture’s new REST services are RPC-like. We’ll create more content on this later and discussions will crop up on the Developer Connection, but for now I’d like to ask those who are interested in being part of our Beta process to reach out to me (brent at adobe dot com). I would love to have you as part of the beta process!

Over the last year we’ve seen good adoption rates for our APIs and we’ve gathered a good amount of feedback. One thing we’ve seen is that, although SOAP is the standard for enterprise-class development, it takes a pretty savvy developer to go ahead and get a project setup to make SOAP calls. There are many more people out there who would like to test out different aspects of our APIs or experiment who just don’t take as much time to dive in. We want to give them the ability to dive in and start playing around. In order to address this, we’ve put together an explorer giving developers the ability to enter their credentials, choose the data center (environment) where their report suite resides, select one of the many methods available via the WSDL and execute a request. Input parameters for the call can be modified in the Request pane and the response can be viewed in the Response pane. We’ll put together more samples and videos outlining how to use the explorer, but for now we’d like to give you the opportunity to play around with it while it is in beta:

https://developer.omniture.com/apiexplorer
(use your Developer Connection account to login and gain access)

Please keep in mind that calls made through the Explorer do in fact consume tokens that are allotted to your company in SiteCatalyst. You have 2,000 tokens allotted to you for free. Also, it should be noted that Partner version of the APIs is not yet accessible through the explorer, this is intended for clients accessing their environments directly.

Please reach out to the community with any questions! Feel to ask on the forums, respond to this blog post, or email me directly!

• Brent Watson
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