I really don't understand what's happening here. I think we use the term "API" and "server" differently. When I think of an API, I think of a library or something that I can link to. For example the POSIX API, or the P-Threads API. These are available in one way or anther from any language.
This seems to think very differently about APIs. As if APIs are somehow tied to a specific language? When they use the term API, do they maybe mean library?
I think that under the hood, the idea is that, if you want to do something, in another language (rather than just writing it in the language) you somehow generate a stub in both languages and then proxy through a (network?) connection?
To make this more complex, it seems that the proxy connections are not just on the local machine, but over the internet to another machine. Presumably you have to pay for this?
Am I right? This seems like a lot of effort to go through just to avoid figuring out how to do something directly. With really sucky performance implications. I guess it depends on what you're doing. Most languages support a foreign interface to C, so maybe that is a more sensible way to do this rather than setting up "servers" and tunnelling commands and data back and forth.
EDIT: I just had another look at the website. So, when they use the term API - it would seem that they mean some sort of an HTTP based web interface? The idea is that you have some kind of script that does something for you and you can query it from you local script. I still don't understand why you'd want to do this over running it locally?
I think the idea is that if you have a useful script, you can set it up here just once and it's automatically wrapped with an HTTP-based interface so you can use it like an API. Now you can use that script from any Internet-connected device, with basically zero setup on each device. I'm not sure if I can think of something I'd want to use it for, but this is an interesting idea and a great proof-of-concept implementation.
I think perhaps the most interesting part of this is that they're apparently spinning up/down Python (and other languages) sandbox environments on the fly, nearly instantaneously.
You're totally right. I'm not sure API is the best word for it, but haven't found a better one. Would love your thoughts!
I've heard a bunch of crazy usecases from HN over the past day but my original one was to simply take some of the python and R scripts I had, and without much work (a few clicks actually) be able to execute them from my frontnd js, or from rails workers. It worked really well so we decided to see if others might find it useful too.
It's badass to see what others are coming up with in the API Library, hoping that can be a valuable page for everyone. And I imagine when we figure out fair pricing, we can actually make this significantly cheaper than a dedicated server for these processes.
Please, continue to send feedback like this. You're awesome.
I'm not sure I understand what this is. Free hosted PaaS for single files, essentially? I know nothing about where the code is running? Is it performant? Is it reliable? How are they covering server costs / at what point would I be asked to pay, and how much?
Great questions. Let me answer them one at a time!
Where is the code running? Every script run happens in its own sandbox on our machines. We use docker, it's awesome. People are asking for dedicated machines specifically for their company, and others are asking to hook into their own machines. Once we figure out how people/companies want to use the site, we'll put up some options for where code will be run. I'm totally open to feedback and would love to hear what you think.
I'm measuring costs right now. But I'm seeing that when we get a fair pricing model up - if you could hit these api's only when you need them, rather than have a dedicated server for them, you'd save a money. A really different way of looking at PaaS + Apis... and I'm super excited about it. Right now, I'm just trying to collect as much awesome feedback as possible for use cases, and then we'll have a better idea for how users would want to be charged. Right now, people are asking for a simple request-based model. Would love your thoughts on this as well.
I'd be more interested in seeing an infrastructure for scraping where the API functions are fixed, but the actual scraping functions are dynamically loaded so that the API user doesn't have to maintain it or re-pull/re-fork/re-compile when the website design changes.
Bonus points if one can make an ORM out of it, e.g.
for article in get_api('reddit.com').todayilearned.filter('new').limit(100):
... do something ...
Where a call to get_api() dynamically fetches the latest scraping functions, in case reddit's page design has changed.
Triple bonus points if the system can be designed in a de-centralized fashion to defend against ToSes that try to disrciminate between human eyes and machine eyes.
I created http://scrape.ly with some of those points described. It's a bit of journey of getting there and I'd love to know in more detail about what you have in mind.
The API generation with Blockspring and Kimonolab is very nicely done but I like to focus solely on the web scraping more, as it represents very difficult set of challenges.
What are you options if a site/service doesn't provide an API? I am looking into creating a third-party Android app for https://askbot.com/ which is an open-sourced (GPLv3) version of StackExchange-like website. Askbot has a limited read-only API. It is written in Python and I am not sure how much work it would be to write APIs for it.
We should do an Ask HN about this :). Would love your feedback on what makes most sense.
People have messaged me asking for pricing tiers based on rate limits / usage, or purchasing company machines to run all apis from, or even paying for extra privacy (like on github).
It would be sort of cool to implement cryptanalysis tools as APIs using this. Like "submit your data and we'll tell you what it might be". I built some tools in python the first time I was working on the Matasano crypto challenges but Go is a better choice. Would be nice if it was supported.
Truth is most people's APIs really cost us nothing to run, so we'd rather not charge for it :P
I'm a really big believer in sites that provide a ton of utility for free, and only charge you when you're actually costing the company something.
That said if you do want to use a ton of CPU, that gets expensive for us - so we may make paid accounts for people that use CPU heavy API's. We realized Blockspring would still be a lot cheaper than keeping your own EC2 server up all the time, so that's sorta cool!
Also if you wanted it set-up locally at your company and 24/7 phone support (from the two of us), we'd have a paid account to cover our time.
Check this out: https://github.com/hmarr/codecube
1. It's open source
2. Put this on heroku and use it privately.
3. Highly stable(because it's write using golang, you can run millions of request, and it's still work fine)
???
NONPROFIT
But project no longer in developing, so i guess maybe someone wants to reanimate codecube? On weekends for example, contact me: iamjacke AT gmail.com
I personally like the google reverse image search hack :).
I used to just run that python script manually on my computer. Now I can just call it from my front-end js when users upload images and return back some text about the image.
But you can do just about anything. Users have done r statistics from js. Or python sentiment analyses (lots of good libraries there) whenever they get user comments in their rails app.
[+] [-] deadgrey19|11 years ago|reply
This seems to think very differently about APIs. As if APIs are somehow tied to a specific language? When they use the term API, do they maybe mean library?
I think that under the hood, the idea is that, if you want to do something, in another language (rather than just writing it in the language) you somehow generate a stub in both languages and then proxy through a (network?) connection?
To make this more complex, it seems that the proxy connections are not just on the local machine, but over the internet to another machine. Presumably you have to pay for this?
Am I right? This seems like a lot of effort to go through just to avoid figuring out how to do something directly. With really sucky performance implications. I guess it depends on what you're doing. Most languages support a foreign interface to C, so maybe that is a more sensible way to do this rather than setting up "servers" and tunnelling commands and data back and forth.
EDIT: I just had another look at the website. So, when they use the term API - it would seem that they mean some sort of an HTTP based web interface? The idea is that you have some kind of script that does something for you and you can query it from you local script. I still don't understand why you'd want to do this over running it locally?
[+] [-] tlrobinson|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bwood|11 years ago|reply
I think perhaps the most interesting part of this is that they're apparently spinning up/down Python (and other languages) sandbox environments on the fly, nearly instantaneously.
[+] [-] hackerews|11 years ago|reply
You're totally right. I'm not sure API is the best word for it, but haven't found a better one. Would love your thoughts!
I've heard a bunch of crazy usecases from HN over the past day but my original one was to simply take some of the python and R scripts I had, and without much work (a few clicks actually) be able to execute them from my frontnd js, or from rails workers. It worked really well so we decided to see if others might find it useful too.
It's badass to see what others are coming up with in the API Library, hoping that can be a valuable page for everyone. And I imagine when we figure out fair pricing, we can actually make this significantly cheaper than a dedicated server for these processes.
Please, continue to send feedback like this. You're awesome.
[+] [-] superuser2|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackerews|11 years ago|reply
Great questions. Let me answer them one at a time!
Where is the code running? Every script run happens in its own sandbox on our machines. We use docker, it's awesome. People are asking for dedicated machines specifically for their company, and others are asking to hook into their own machines. Once we figure out how people/companies want to use the site, we'll put up some options for where code will be run. I'm totally open to feedback and would love to hear what you think.
I'm measuring costs right now. But I'm seeing that when we get a fair pricing model up - if you could hit these api's only when you need them, rather than have a dedicated server for them, you'd save a money. A really different way of looking at PaaS + Apis... and I'm super excited about it. Right now, I'm just trying to collect as much awesome feedback as possible for use cases, and then we'll have a better idea for how users would want to be charged. Right now, people are asking for a simple request-based model. Would love your thoughts on this as well.
Thanks again for the questions. You're awesome.
[email protected] 312.834.7265
[+] [-] rstoner|11 years ago|reply
Please buy these guys and enable this functionality for gists.
[+] [-] donpinkus|11 years ago|reply
Do you have example gists you've want API'd? We could take a look tonight about how to implement this
[+] [-] hackerews|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epaga|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackerews|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackerews|11 years ago|reply
PS - to see the libraries we currently support, check out: https://api.blockspring.com/documentation
[+] [-] blockspring|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dheera|11 years ago|reply
Bonus points if one can make an ORM out of it, e.g.
Where a call to get_api() dynamically fetches the latest scraping functions, in case reddit's page design has changed.Triple bonus points if the system can be designed in a de-centralized fashion to defend against ToSes that try to disrciminate between human eyes and machine eyes.
[+] [-] donpinkus|11 years ago|reply
Or if someone on here knows how to do this, and wants to throw up an API on Blockspring for it, we'd all love it :)
[+] [-] notastartup|11 years ago|reply
The API generation with Blockspring and Kimonolab is very nicely done but I like to focus solely on the web scraping more, as it represents very difficult set of challenges.
[+] [-] xmonkee|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkfoling|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donniezazen|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JustARandomGuy|11 years ago|reply
Is there a way to sign up for a paid account or a credit system? I don't want to burden you guys with the costs of my API requests.
[+] [-] hackerews|11 years ago|reply
People have messaged me asking for pricing tiers based on rate limits / usage, or purchasing company machines to run all apis from, or even paying for extra privacy (like on github).
What's most fair / makes most sense for you?
[+] [-] mentat|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackerews|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackerews|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alvare|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eropple|11 years ago|reply
https://github.com/seanedwards/svcizer
[+] [-] tlrobinson|11 years ago|reply
"STDOUT and STDERR from cmd will be dumped to the response body."
"HTTP headers and query parameters will be passed as environment variables."
Uhhh, your friend just reinvented CGI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface
[+] [-] joeyspn|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackerews|11 years ago|reply
[email protected]
3128347265
[+] [-] giancarlostoro|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donpinkus|11 years ago|reply
I'm a really big believer in sites that provide a ton of utility for free, and only charge you when you're actually costing the company something.
That said if you do want to use a ton of CPU, that gets expensive for us - so we may make paid accounts for people that use CPU heavy API's. We realized Blockspring would still be a lot cheaper than keeping your own EC2 server up all the time, so that's sorta cool!
Also if you wanted it set-up locally at your company and 24/7 phone support (from the two of us), we'd have a paid account to cover our time.
Obviously if you have ideas let us know!
[+] [-] jawbone|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacke|11 years ago|reply
But project no longer in developing, so i guess maybe someone wants to reanimate codecube? On weekends for example, contact me: iamjacke AT gmail.com
[+] [-] koesterd|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackerews|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrstrawberry|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grimtrigger|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donpinkus|11 years ago|reply
I already knew how to do screenshots in Python, and was tired of relearning this stuff in a different language for each project.
So I made an API that takes a screenshot, and now I don't need to learn it ever again :)
https://api.blockspring.com/users/mapsup/blocks/07b6410853fa...
[+] [-] hackerews|11 years ago|reply
I used to just run that python script manually on my computer. Now I can just call it from my front-end js when users upload images and return back some text about the image.
https://api.blockspring.com/users/pkpp1233/blocks/5a1b66ef20...
But you can do just about anything. Users have done r statistics from js. Or python sentiment analyses (lots of good libraries there) whenever they get user comments in their rails app.
[+] [-] gear54rus|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackerews|11 years ago|reply