Lately I’ve noticed that more and more service seem to include API testing in their list of services. For instance this week at Chirp, Twitter announced their development console available on dev.twitter.com which gives you the ability to test the API without really having to write any code just yet.

This feature is also well known for people using Hurl which is a website that you can use to make HTTP requests and test your API responses. Also on OSX there’s the HTTP Client Tool which does more or less the same as the ones above.

Another company that announced this feature this week was Apigee:

Use the API Console to review an API’s structure, experiment with the endpoint, and review the request and response messages. We’re launching with support for Twitter APIs and are adding more soon

Apigee is basically an analytics tool for your API. It allows you to track requests, users, errors, etc. So for them, implementing the API tester is something that makes sense as they provide statistics for you API, if you notice an error, you should be able to just test the API call and see if you can reproduce from within Apigee.

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As the web grows, we developers have to write applications that are not location centric but rather develop applications that can be viewed by anyone around the world. Any developer that had to write such software probably has used GeoIP and has encountered issues when the time came to test their application. The only real way to test your application, without setting up servers around the world, is to assume that your code works and that the GeoIP database is working correctly.

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As some of you may know from the tweets I’ve been posting for nearly 3 weeks now, I was invited to attend the very first edition of the JumpInCamp organized by Microsoft in April 2010.

The goal of this camp was to get the European PHP community leaders together and learn about the new products and new ideas Microsoft are working on. For those of you who read about the Microsoft web developer summit that took place in Redmond in December 2009 you might think it was the same thing however you would be utterly wrong.

While the camp in Redmond was very informative and we are learnt a great deal of new features coming up with Microsoft, it was vastly different than the JumpinCamp in Zurich where the focus of the camp was to get the developers to interact with the actual Microsoft developers instead of only learning about new features. The point of the JumpinCamp was to get your hands dirty in code so we all got a few hours of lectures, then sat down and worked on either implementing those solutions into our respective Open Source projects or even discussed and raised concerns we might have regarding some of their products.

I thought it might be nice to share some of the projects I’ve started working on while I was over there and what I had interests in:
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Introduction

At echolibre we’ve been trying to organize our sales and customer relationship in a more efficient way as the company customer base is getting larger and larger. That’s natural process for any growing company. In order to help us organize how we do everything related to customers (Sales, Leads, Relationships, etc) we are giving Capsule CRM a good run.

Capsule CRM is basically a nice CRM tool that takes the boring part out of CRM’ing. Moreover (And the whole reason of this blog post), it has an API and as you all know, we LOVE APIs.

Therefore, we realized that we needed to integrate Capsule with some online services we have and so we built a PHP wrapper for their API to give developers the ability to place requests and use the web service as they wish using PHP

Services_Capsule is now being proposed to PEAR however you can already get the code from http://github.com/davidcoallier/Services_Capsule and start using it. The lack of end-user documentation may be the greatest lack in the package right now so I figured it might be good to post a few usage examples in a post.

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