iPhone Journal – Exploring The AOL Journals API - Part 3

A page of my journal is like a cake of portable soup. A little may be diffused into a considerable portion. - James Boswell

This is Part 3 of my development of the iPhone Journal application. In Part 1 I discussed the state of iPhone development and the Aptana development environment. In Part 2 I discussed JavaScript libraries that can assist with iPhone development. This week I’ll look at the AOL Journals API.

AOL Journal API

Before we can get started putting together the iPhone Jounal application, we need to have a good understanding of the AOL Journals API. There are three essential items to review: obtaining and using a Dev Id, authentication, and the actual blog operations.

Your Dev Id

A Dev Id identifies the application or web site that is performing the blog operations. A Dev Id for your application can be obtained from http://dev.aol.com/keys. The key should be passed in the X-AOL-DEVID custom header element for each POST, PUT, or DELETE operation. The REFERER header element is also required. Without a valid Dev Id, a 444 error will be returned.

Authentication

All blog operations that make modification require authentication. AOL Journals utilize the AOL OpenAuth mechanism. I will discuss the details of obtaining an OpenAuth token in an upcoming blog, but for now it’s important to note that the OpenAuth token must be passed in the Authorization header.

Blog Operations

The AOL Journals API implements a REST based protocol, REST based protocol which uses the HTTP methods GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE to manipulate server collection (blog), entry, and comment resources. The complete reference to all Blog operations can be found here: http://dev.aol.com/aolblogs_api_docs

I want to focus on the four Blog operations that will be the primary focus of our application: posting an entry, editing an entry, deleting an entry, and retrieving an entry. These operations utilize the REST POST, PUT, DELETE, and GET operations respectively.

The operations utilize the standard ATOM Entry element. AOL Journals also utilizes a extensions to the basic Entry element, which are documented at http://dev.aol.com/aolblogs_api_docs#mozTocId136350.

Next Steps

Now that we have an understanding of the AOL Journals API and iPhone development tools and IDEs, we’re rerady to start putting everything together. I’ll begin that process in next week’s blog!