Voxel has a lot of customers who really know what they’re doing. Many of them are in the business of writing code, and pointing and clicking and typing — manual stuff — is the kind of thing these customers tend to like to avoid. Be it purging content from VoxCAST, provisioning a new VPS or dedicated server, rebooting a machine, fetching performance data — whatever — there’s a case for letting our customers do it in code.
Voxel Labs to the rescue once again — this time with hAPI, Voxel’s new Hosting API. hAPI turns much of Voxel’s infrastructure inside-out and makes it programmatically accessible to our customers. hAPI is a REST API based on HTTP requests and XML or JSON responses, a lot like other popular web services APIs. To read more about the hAPI interface and get started, check out the hAPI documentation.
We’re releasing hAPI first to our VoxCAST customers. VoxCAST is an obvious target for programmatic interaction, especially for content management. Right now, you can use hAPI to prepopulate your VoxCAST cache; purge content in several ways; and fetch up to the minute statistics for your VoxCAST devices. Several VoxCAST customers have been using hAPI for a while now, and the response has been simply stellar. One of our customers, Advomatic, has even taken the time to put together and release a spiffy open source PHP client class for hAPI — available on the hAPI site. (Thanks guys!)
We’ve got big plans for hAPI. It will grow to encompass a lot of the ways customers interact with Voxel. Right now, we’re working hard to develop and test hAPI’s device and domain management interfaces. We’re also planning interfaces for support and billing functionality.
Importantly, we think the hosting industry at large can benefit from hAPI, which is why we’ve decided to release the hAPI specification and documentation under a Creative Commons license. This means other companies can develop hAPI-compatible interfaces of their own so that customers’ applications can interact consistently across different providers. We hope the idea gains some traction, and of course we’d love to hear suggestions from others in the industry.
So, if you’re a VoxCAST customer, start using hAPI today! And other Voxel customers: hAPI will be making your lives easier very soon.
Posted in General Posts, Press |
December 1st, 2008 at 12:41 pm
[...] month ago we announced hAPI, a HTTP REST API with XML or JSON responses, and the exposure of some VoxCAST CDN functionality [...]