The GSMA Mobile Innovation Exchange have a competition for Best Use of OneAPI. You may apply to enter up to April 26th.



To get up and running with OneAPI then visit the Reference Implementation and forums at http://oneapi.aepona.com

I'm delighted to announce that the first of the GSMA One APIs, Messaging, is now available for testing on Betavine (thanks to Owen, Kev and team :).

The One (Open Network Enablers) API is a GSMA project aiming to make it easier to embed network capabilities in your Web applications, and to greatly reduce the integration work needed when deploying such applications across multiple network operators. One API provides a common, lightweight set of functions for SMS, location, Charging, Connection Profile and User Profile. The goal is that these should be easy to use for both mobile and fixed Web developers, so that you can spend more time innovating and less time integrating. It also offers an easy way to experiment with fixed/mobile 'convergence' applications, i.e. where both fixed and mobile capabilities can be used together to create a compelling application.

The project is also looking at ways to improve the non-technical aspects of integration to operators, i.e. AAA, certification etc. which have been mentioned as being more of a hindrance to mobile innovation than the differences in technical APIs between operators.

The project is a public beta, and we are asking for developers to collaborate with operators and vendors to help ensure these are quality, relevant and useable APIs. We have initially produced RESTful bindings and greatly simplified profiles of the Parlay X Web Service bindings; the reaction and suggestions from developers will help steer us in the right direction - so if you have any comments, please let us know via the Beta portal at http://www.gsmworld.com/accessentry .

Coming soon will be our Reference Implementation where you will be able to try out the APIs across multiple operators, and collaborate to ensure they are a success. Hope to hear from you soon!

-- Kevin Smith, Vodafone R&D and GSMA One API Project Leader.

I'm in the middle of writing a mashup tutorial for using the Betavine API. It's slow progress. I'm continually getting distracted by bug reports and lengthly meetings.

My mashup uses Javascript to interact with the API. However directly calling the API using Javascript won't work. The browser intercepts and kills any AJAX requests to a remote hosts. So the solution? I wrote a simple proxy in PHP which sits between the Javascript and the Betavine API.

When a request is made the PHP will make the request to the API and return the response in the AJAX call. The Javascript on the web page then fooled into thinking that the AJAX response came from the same host as the web page.

It's a simple technique and is widely used for many mashups.

The code follows:

<?
ob_start();

function logf($message) {
  $fd = fopen('proxy.log', "a");
  fwrite($fd, $message . "\n");
  fclose($fd);
}

?>
<?
$url = $_REQUEST['url'];
logf($url);
$curl_handle = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Owen's AJAX Proxy");

$content = curl_exec($curl_handle);
$content_type = curl_getinfo($curl_handle, CURLINFO_CONTENT_TYPE);
curl_close($curl_handle);
header("Content-Type: $content_type");
echo $content;
ob_flush();
?>

I'm using CURL to make the HTTP request. Notice that I set the User-Agent using

CURLOPT_USERAGENT

. If I set a user agent then the betavine servers will return a 403 security error.

Have fun!

Owen.

I've just discovered a list of UK Government APIs. This includes interesting APIs from Ordnance Survey and Carbon Footprint information. It's bound to create some interesting mashups.

I've noticed that vauschnik has uploaded a C# Library for the Betavine API. I haven't really used C# so can't really test it. Has anybody given it a go?

Owen.