TIBCO Cloud Mashery API Developer Blog

A small but valuable feature was released this week and is available for all clients. The Mashery Proxy service now supports gzip.  This feature has two control options.  Firstly, developer applications may submit calls with HTTP gzip content-encoding directives and the proxy service will pass these through to our customer API endpoints. 

Secondly, we have an option to force gzip compression between Mashery and our customer APIs.  This second option is valuable in situations where the API response size is large, performance may be improved via compression, and you cannot control whether developers are using gzip content-encoding directives.  With this option, by endpoint, we force compression to occure between your API and Mashery so at least performance between us is improved, which may translate into overall performance improvement for your developers and may reduce some of your capacity needs.

Send a mail off to support@mashery.com should you wish to enable it or ask questions in our forum about this feature.

Update 10/27/2008 8am: All reporting data is now displayed as expected.  The 2 week gap period is resolved.

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Update 10/24/2008 4pm: Reporting data is back and accurate for recent activity.  We are still working on getting data displayed for approximately a 2 week period.  So currently, July 1 - Today with the exception of Oct 1-15th, 2008.

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Please note, an upgrade to our new reporting system infrastructure is taking longer than we expected.  Thus, currently, reporting results are inaccurate.  You will see complete days as missing and volumes for days that display are much lower than they should be. 

Based on current progress, we expect this problem to be resolved by early afternoon Pacific time.  We apologize for any inconvenience.  We'll advise when the upgrade completes and the results as back to normal.

September 30, 2008

We are pleased to announce the launch of our Reporting 2.0 capabilities!

Our old system served our clients and Mashery well, but it was definitely starting to feel its age.  As we got closer to this launch, it's been acting up on us as its final protest of its pending retirement.  We will be raising a toast here in the office to the legacy system as we bid it farewell and welcome in the new.

We believe this new platform and the reports we've produced for our initial launch will be of great benefit to our clients as you embark on taking your APIs to the next level.   You will find significant improvements in the data we collect, the types of charts, the ability to drill into some developer details, and just the visual appeal of the new pages.  Our hope is they will allow you to better support your developers, better mine business development opportunities, assist in business processes like billing, and focus your development efforts towards actual demand.

Some highlights of our new capabilities:

• Developer Detail. Interested in what a specific developer is up to?  Drill into the developer to see their application registration details alongside of charts for their volumes, error code counts, and top methods.

• Method Level Detail.  You may now review the methods your developers are calling as we have a Top 5 Methods chart both at the API and Developer levels.

• Flexible Date Ranges. Previously, we were limited to specific dates or week long date ranges.  In this version, pick your own ranges, or select by date range templates like "Last Quarter" or "Last Month".

• Near Real Time.  Previously, calls from today would first show up the following day, and weekly reports were run on the weekends only.  In this version, reporting data is continually indexed, getting close to 15-30 minute lag times.  It really just depends on how much data we're crunching.

• Extraction to CSV. All charts have a download to CSV link.  Most will return full details relevant to that chart.  For example, the Top 5 Methods chart returns data for all methods and their volume counts.

• Data as of July 1, 2008. The reporting system has data starting from Q2 2008, or July 1, 2008.

In addition to how excited we are about this release, we're equally pleased with how the architecture came together.  We'll be able to add new charts easily and in the near future, produce custom reports/charts for our clients.  On that note, tell us what you think of this release.  What did we do well?  What did we miss?  What should we focus on next?  Post your ideas or feedback into our forums.

For those of you that see less than meaningful method level charts, contact your Client Services Manager or support@mashery.com to work with us to configure your API proxy to index the appropriate data.

September 10, 2008

Today we released a few Developer Portal enhancements that are likely to strike a chord with many of our clients. 

1. Single Sign On using SAML.  Optionally enabled, with an ability to map your user/member information into relevant Mashery member attributes, this feature provides a friendlier experience for developers that already have accounts on your other website.  Give us a call or send a note to support@mashery.com if you'd like to explore enabling it for your Mashery Developer Portal.
2. Documentation Sorting.  In the Dashboard CMS (content management system), we've enhanced the Documentation feature to allow you to sort folders and pages more easily.  In prior releases, folders would sort based on alphanumeric order, forcing some of you to use numbering prefixes to sort the way you wanted.  You may now drag folders where you wish them to appear in the documentation nav aid.  Sorting is done by your placement, not alphanumeric order.  You still won't be able to drag Documentation Pages into other folders, but we'll get that one later...
3. Documentation Navigation Aid.  The documentation nav aid has been improved to include previous/next/up controls so your developers may read the documentation more like a book rather than requiring a click on the nav aid page links.  If you wish these controls to be removed from your site, let us know and we'll do it for you.
4. CMS Performance. Drastic improvement in CMS load performance for large documentation sites.
   

Finally, tell us what you think about posting this information via this support Blog.  Is this a good way for you to keep in touch with Mashery product information?  Got another idea? Post to the comments or send us an email at support@mashery.com.

Thanks!  More coming!

September 7, 2008

Here in San Francisco, we're just coming out of our usual foggy summers and are headed into the beautiful weather period where the fog makes way for blue skies every day.  We took advantage of those foggy summer days and worked really hard to release cool new features and get some great customers up and running with their API programs.  Speaking of customers, in the coming month, you'll see some API launch announcements from some more pretty great new Mashery clients.  But I digress (can't help it, we're really excited). 

So what have we been up to these past six weeks since launching our new CMS?  Tons.  Here's a break down of new features that have been released:

• Protocol Translation - built a feature that allows us to more quickly extend your API with additional protocols so your developers can code to their preference without you needing to build it yourself.  Have a SOAP API already but want REST or XML/RPC? Call us.
  
• oAuth - we can help you if you don't want to build oAuth support yourself.  We'll generate, manage and validate your user access tokens.  This standard is becoming more popular and is a great way to protect your customers' sensitive data.
• Email Notification Settings - if you haven't seen it already, log into the Dashboard, navigate to Settings and then the Notifications tab. Add yourself to the bcc: anytime a developer signs up or registers for a key.  Or customize the email content that is sent to your developers during registrations.
• Application Registration Form Flexibility - more easily add or remove fields from the application and key registration pages.

Last but not least, our reporting team has been cranking the hours all summer working on our exciting new reporting platform.  We have some final kinks to work out, but it's getting very close now.  Have a sneak peak at method level reporting for a single developer... we hope you like it!

We are pleased to announce that on Tuesday June 17th we will be rolling out our new Content Management System (CMS) for administration of your Mashery Powered Developer Portal.    The update will happen at 1:00pm (pacific).  The upgrade will result in no system down time and will take less than a minute to complete.

New CMS features and upgrades include:

• WYSIWYG Interface for page creation and editing
• Create and update custom pages, documentation and blogs
• Create stylized and rich pages quickly and easily
• Add code blocks, custom CSS and javascript for each page
• Tabbed page editing. Keep multiple pages open to switch back and forth during editing
• File upload
• Ability to do Internationalization of pages – Please contact us for more information on this

We have several customers that have been actively using the new CMS in beta and have provided a great deal of testing and feedback.   We expect this upgrade will significantly simplify Portal administration via the Dashboard.

As part of the conversion to the new CMS system, we are deprecating the markdown markup format in favor of HTML.  We will automatically convert existing markdown documents to HTML using the same algorithm that we use to display these documents today.  There will be no change in the presentation of your content.  Markdown is still available for wiki documents.

Welcome to the Mashery Product Blog.  We will be using this space to blog about new product features and developments.  A list of recent posts will appear on the summary page in your dashboard. You may also wish to  subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog.