David Deraedt

These last few days, I spent some time playing around with the Get Satisfaction API. I liked it so much that I decided to create an open source flex library for it.

If you haven't heard of Get Satisfaction yet, then go ahead and take a look at their website. It's a centralized crowd sourced costumer service for any product of any company. The service is both interesting and very well executed.

Their API is a REST API, which allows developers to make pretty basic but yet useful read and write queries such as getting the list of companies registered with their service, accessing the replies for topic about a particular product, post a response, etc...

While the API is pretty well designed, I soon realized that it would be much more simple to build a library that would encapsulate the call and response to these remote methods. In particular, I thought it would be useful to map the responses into ActionScript3 typed value objects.

So I built a first draft of this library and created a open source project (GoogleCode project page). You can download the SWC file and its documentation at the download page. This first version is rather limited since it only allows you to read the data of Get Satisfaction. I haven't implemented any of the write methods so far. The good news is you don't need any API key to use those methods.

Here's a screenshot of the proof-of concept application I used to test the library:

To be completely honest, I'm not sure exactly what kind of Flex or AIR project could be built on top of the Get Satisfaction API, using my library or not. But I'm thinking about it, and I'm sure some people will come up with great ideas, eventually.

Of course, if you have opinions / feature requests / bug reports, or if you want to join the project, feel free to leave a comment or to contact me via my contact page.

NB: On a side note, am I the only person here that flashplayer's HTTP headers "security features" are driving crazy ? I thought the new allow-headers parameters in a crossdomain file would finally solve it all, and yet I was completely unable to send a Accept header with a GET method. I spent more time on this issue than writing the whole library.