xxxlucas's blog

After launching v1.2, we went heads down again to work on our next project, Eclipse Spaces.

Finally, we have something to show for it and it has been really exciting! For those of you who are not familiar with Eclipse, it is one of the largest, non-for profit open source software groups in the world. They produce a wide range of tools, one of the most popular is the Eclipse Java Development Environment.

If you are an Eclipse developer, publishing and promoting your work has always been an issue. If you are working on an official Eclipse project, you can ride their coat tails, but if you are that lone entrepreneurial developer or that small team; you had to set up your own infrastructure to host and collaborate. Eclipse Spaces is a new standard that allows you to plug into any space provider with an adaptor. Once you have your space set up, you can publish and consume new Eclipse tools from right inside of Eclipse. As a developer, the hard work begun after development was done. It is the packaging, documenting, making and testing installers, etc. So we wanted Eclipse Spaces to be simple, part of the development environment, and open. So once I am done with my code, I publish it and get a URL to an update site. I can share that URL with people and with it they can install the binaries or even the code if I make it open source.

First of all, thanks to the whole team for getting this launched. And another big thanks to all of you for sending in comments, questions, and just using version 1.1. The last time I talked about this was in October, but we have been heads down in bug scrubs, legal reviews, load tests, and a whole slew of other things to get this package wrapped up tight for everyone.

Today Open Xdrive JSON API v1.2 is officially available to the public. We have made a lot of improvements and added a lot of features. You can check out the "What's New" to get a general idea.

Version 1.2 is almost there.

A lot of you have probably heard about our BlueString launch. Some of the Dev AOL bloggers gave us a good write up. So we are very tired and very pleased to have finished such a big project. So, what's in it for you?

Other than another great free service (did I mention that we just launched BlueString?), BlueString is running on our new v1.2 API. So yes, that means v1.2 is finished and tested. So we are spending a little bit more time getting the documentation, example code, and other such together for you guys. And as promised, it has support for OpenAuth logins, our shows, and a lot of the great features we use in BlueString.

Progammable Web is a great site that covers web APIs, mashups, and the like. Today they ran an article about the top 7 online storage APIs. It is exciting for us to see "Open", "AOL" and "API" getting more and more coverage.

We are all heads down right now working on the next version. We will be patching our v1.1 to include OpenAuth support and launching our v1.2 service soon. I am literally sneaking away from what is supposed to be our "Release Candidate" build to QA, because I was so excited by the article! So stay tuned, we should have a lot of new stuff out in a little.

The Open Xdrive developers are on the road again. Last weekend Maria, our lead developer, gave a presentation at LA Flash, showing how easy it is to combine our JSON API and Flash/Flex based web apps. This week I will be at Mashup Camp in Mountain View. If you make it, stop by my presentation on Tuesday. I will be showing how to use the API to store content on Xdrive and easily incorporate it into other applications and sites using our publishing calls.

When we launched, we(Open Xdrive) had the unfortunate fate of living with a place-holder logo that I had put together. Let's just say that coders and talented designers are not usually the same people.

But I am pleased to announce that today we go live with a truly spiffy logo designed by people with talent (aka, not me!).

I know, you are all waiting for the next version, and instead we gave you a logo. But, since the graphic talent swooped to our aid that has freed up the Open Xdrive team to get back to work on version 1.2. We are now heads down into simplifying our authentication, just like we promised.

Going Digital Hollywood that is! For the past three days we have been demoing our new API at Digital Hollywood . We met a lot of small site developers who were really interested in the storage and asset management infrastructure we could provide, allowing them to compete with the big site developers without having buy the same big time server farms.

I have to admit, the Hollywood crowd seemed more tuned into Truveo, one of our sister APIs that is all about online video searching and indexing. Movie people....it figures.

Hello World! That is the traditional way to start a program, so seems fine enough to start this program too.

Xdrive is launching several projects aimed at opening up our technology to the world of developers and technology enthusiasts. The two biggies we are starting with are:
1) we are opening up the JSON API we use to the world to use.
2) we are working with Eclipse.org to create EclipseSpaces, a place for developers to publish their code and binaries that will be integrated with the Eclipse IDE.