API Blender: A Uniform Interface to Social Platform APIs

Abstract: With the growing success of the social Web, most Web developers have to interact with at least one social Web platform, which implies studying the related API specifications. These are often only informally described, may contain errors, lack harmonization, and generally speaking make the developer's work difficult. Most attempts to solve this problem, proposing formal description languages for Web service APIs, have had limited success outside of B2B applications; we believe it is due to their top-down nature. In addition, a programmer dealing with one or several of these APIs has to deal with a number of related tasks such as data integration, requests chaining, or policy management, that are cumbersome to implement. Inspired by the SPORE project, we present API Blender, an open-source solution to describe, interact with, and integrate the most common social Web APIs. In this perspective, we first introduce two new lightweight description formats for requests and services and demonstrate their relevance with respect to current platform APIs. We present our Python implementation of API Blender and its features regarding authentication, policy management and multi-platform data integration.