February 7 2008
The MySpace Developer Platform is now online, sort of. Hats off to these guys for shipping, although at this time, you can only play by invite only, which they are hand picking, according to their blog. The other slightly frustrating thing is that, at this time, if you do manage to get a key, and you do manage to write an application, you have to invite others to be able to see it, as explained here. The interesting model in this case is that you have to actually log into MySpace as the application in order to grant others the right to use your application. All of this is subject to change once the platform matures, but it makes things a little rough at first. I just want to get on the whitelist!
They have a REST API and there's already a good thread going in the forums on writing a .NET Client library for it. Interested? Come join the thread.
Another interesting thing to note is, on the server side, they've implemented this using Windows Communication Foundation, which they'll be talking about at Mix. My goal: bring some client WinFX goodness to the party ;).
Makes me wonder what kind of WCF client could be written for these services. There is the [WebGet] attribute. So, I suppose, you'd grab the XML from the REST service and infer schema from it and then pass that to SvcUtil to generate a proxy. Should work. I guess the question is how much elegance/productivity/performance one gains by using WCF on the client for a REST service.
Sidenote: too many .NET wrappers out there seem to roll there own serialization. There's such great baked in support in the framework for XML Serialization that I'd love to see the emerging MySpace .NET client take advantage of it, whether through WCF or not. The other option would be to look at the work done in the Google .NET client library, which is factored so elegantly and has a rockin ATOM parser. It still isn't entirely clear to me how much of the MySpace data is formatted as ATOM data.
