Temboo is a NYC-based startup that I first heard about at NY Tech Day last year. I knew it had something to do with those three dreaded initials, API. I’ve been trying to limit my programming excursions these days, so I put Temboo off to the side. Very recently I’ve begun searching around government sites, looking for background on my latest focus, data privacy and protection laws. In certain circumstances, I was forced to take extreme measures and code up web APIs (with a dash of PHP) to pull out relevant data– it’s never a pleasant experience.
In olden days, I would work with Yahoo Pipes, which was a compromise solution. Essentially, you drew some lines with its graphical interface to connect all the plumbing together, and at the end of the pipeline you’d have a list of filtered fields. It was all very clunky, and I never quite figured out some of their widgetry. But Marissa, if you’re reading, Pipes is one of those Yahoo apps that’s worth saving.
Then I remembered Temboo, and took a closer look. Think of it as a software makeover for ugly APIs. Instead of having to do any real coding, you can, if you’d like, work directly within your browser (see above) to test their library of APIs–about 50 or so, including NY Times, Google Flickr, Box,etc. So … you get the API key from the service–in my case, I was using Sunlight Labs legislative APIs— and then fill out the Temboo fields to run a test query. I successfully conducted a search for data privacy legislation in the US Senate.
You can leave it at that: simply think of Temboo as a great time saver and a way to explore APIs without lifting a coding finger. If you’re real developer, though, you’ll download their SDK and then continue your software work. Temboo provides additional training wheels in that you can pull out the code snippets from your browser experiment–it generates the calls–and then insert into a file of PHP, Python, Ruby, Android, IOS, and Java, which are all supported. Temboo also automatically handles JSON conversion, another painful task you avoid with this API beautifier.
I didn’t take that last step. It’s browser testing capability is perfect for my research tasks. Thanks Temboo!