On Friday evening we quietly announced on twitter a product that we’ve been working on for the last 10 months. FRAPI is an Open Source API framework that allows you to open up your existing web based application or legacy system to your own or third party developers.

FRAPI handles standard API things like authentication and data formatting, and speeds up the API development process — like the way ZF or Symfony for PHP, Django for Python, JQuery for JavaScript (or, I suppose even Ruby on Rails ;-p ), does for other technologies.

David Coallier put together a quick 5 minute screencast to show you how you can use FRAPI to start building your API. (more…)

Watch out! The semantic web is on the way, a thought that many (and not just the marketeers) may find daunting . Why? Because system and web app developers that want to take advantage of the semantic web will need to learn a lot of new standards and change the way they work.

I have been studying and working with web standards (XHTML, RDF, ATOM, RSS) for well over 4 years now, something I am glad of,  because recently something struck me. Conventions are arising, for example DOAP, SKOS and others, that are built on top of the Resource Description Framework otherwise known as RDF, if they aren’t, they are usually built on something very similar or related. (more…)

This past weekend we went along to Dublin’s OSS BarCamp. There were some really great talks, Stuart Langridge’s Javascript presentation was a highlight. Jaime Hemmett’s talk on using Git for version control was useful and informative. Paul Biggar’s talk on PHC, the Open Source PHP Compiler, was thought provoking and certainly caused a few grumbles from PHP guys like myself in the audience ;). JD and myself managed to catch up with him after and talk through some of his ideas over a drink. (more…)