New Simple Cloud Storage API Launched

PHP/Zend, Microsoft, IBM, Rackspace, GoGrid and Nirvanix have launched a new low level cloud API for PHP called the "Simple Cloud API http://www.simplecloud.org/".

The API can best be described as low level storage focused API (An API for other API's). In a sense it's a way to create other higher level programmatic API interfaces such as REST or SOAP using an easy, yet portable PHP programming environment. The Simple API allows you to easily interact with a variety of cloud interfaces including support for File Storage, Document Storage, and Simple Queue services. The Simple Cloud API is not a web service; it is an API that exposes common operations in application services offered by different vendors, making it easier for PHP developers to build ‘cloud native’ applications.

According to the website http://www.simplecloud.org/, "The Simple Cloud API is here to bring cloud technologies to PHP and the PHP philosophy to the cloud. With it, developers can start writing scalable and highly available applications that are still *portable*. If you're looking for code to start playing around with immediately, you'll find the first file storage, document storage, and simple queue interfaces."

Interestingly the goal of API is not be a standard, but instead to foster an open source community that makes it easier for developers to use cloud application services by abstracting insignificant API differences. Another goal of this initiative is to define interfaces to be implemented as a new Zend Framework http://framework.zend.com/ component called ‘Zend_Cloud’. The Zend Framework will provide a repository of php appplication to host code for the Zend_Cloud.

Check out the project at http://www.simplecloud.org

Enterprise mashup market to increase tenfold over next five years

A new report from Business Insights predicts that the enterprise mashup market, worth around $161 million in 2008, will expand more than tenfold to $1.74 billion by 2013.

About 33% of companies now use enterprise mashups, Business Insights says.

The catalyst for the enterprise mashup market will be SOA — Business Insights puts the SOA platform market at about $1.4 billion in 2008, which will double in size, to about $2.77 billion by 2014.

It’s interesting that the enterprise mashup market, which currently is about 11% the size of the overall SOA platform market, will soon be 63% the size, or getting close to comparable. This is huge for the front-end part of the equation, if these numbers pan out. But does it make sense?

The Google Analytics API and PHP

The Google Analytics API allows developers to extend Google Analytics in new and creative ways that benefit developers, organizations and end users. Large organizations and agencies now have a standardized platform for integrating Analytics data with their own business data. Developers can integrate Google Analytics into their existing products and create standalone applications that they sell. Users could see snapshots of their Analytics data in developer created dashboards and gadgets. Individuals and business owners will have opportunities to access their Google Analytics information in a variety of new ways.

Google Analytics API PHP Class

Cris Hope has created a PHP class for accessing the Google Analytics API with CURL and using DOMDocument to parse the XML. The resulting class and example script can be downloaded here and there are a number of posts on this website showing how to use it.

Code Reuse

Feel free to use the class as you wish but if re-posting it on other websites or using it in your own projects or for your customers, please retain the notice in the analytics class file attributing the original work to Cris.

GA API Introductory Posts

The following posts cover a couple of things about the Google Analytics API:

• Get the ID for the Google Analytics API IDS parameter
• Google Analytics API dimensions vs metrics
  

Code examples

The following code examples have been posted for using the Analytics class:

• Basic data example getting the most popular pages
• Get the profile id from the accounts list
• Get data without a dimension
• Looping through the data
  
• Using filters
• Paging through result data
• Calculating a page's bounce rate

25 Mashups for Music Lyrics

From: programableweb

You now have your choice of over two dozen web mashups about music that also integrate song lyrics. If you look at this list of 25 song lyrics mashups, you’ll see that most of them make use of either one of the 2 lyrics APIs we have listed, one from LyricWiki.org and the other from Lyricsfly.

We currently have 11 LyricWiki mashups and 11 Lyricsfly mashups. These mashups are some of the most complex we see in terms of number of APIs used. Many use 4-7 different web service APIs to pull in photos, videos, reference data and streaming music.

The LastLyrics mashup is a classic example, it combines the LyricWiki API and the Last.fm API to let you type in the username of any Last.fm user, and immediately get back the lyrics for many of the songs on that person’s playlist.

There are now 44 music APIs and 230 music mashups in our directory. Use our Music API and Mashup Dashboard to see the latest in this space and our Music Feed to get the latest music-related APIs, mashups and news via RSS.