Response Formats

The Vodafone Betavine API is designed to be flexible in its output format. This allows the API to be used by a variety of languages on many different devices.

Currently the output formats supported are XML, JSON, RSS and Plain Text.

The format of the request and response is determined by the dot extension. For example to authenticate using an XML schema I would use the following URL: /api/authenticate.xml using the .xml extension.

Not formats are suitable for all API method calls. For example RSS would not be suitable for returning an authentication call, and Plain would not be suitable for returning a list of projects. If a method does not support the requested format then it will return an error code.

XML - eXtended Markup Language

XML is a very popular data interchange format. It has a strong support in a variety of languages and systems.

JSON - JavaScript Object Notation

JSON is a method of representing Javascript objects as plain text. It allows Javascript or ECMAScript applications to quickly interpret the result of the API calls.

Applications more suited to using JSON are widgets and web mashups.

For more information visit http://www.json.org/

Plain - Plain Text

This is the minimalist version of the API. It allows API methods to be called and processed with the minimum amount of processing and transfer cost. The protocol for the connection is restricted to plain text and markup is kept to a minimum.

The Plain format is useful in the following situations

• The application might not be capable of parsing XML or JSON
• Where data transfer cost is high, and the developer wishes to use the minimum amount of bandwidth.
• The developer does not want to include any libraries for the API parsing and want to easily interpret the response themselves.

In most cases the Plain API will provide you with less information than its XML or JSON counterparts

RSS - Really Simple Syndication

For API methods which return Vodafone Betavine content such as applications/find or download/find you can request an RSS feed. This allows the API to be used in conjunction with RSS Aggregators.