After a slight delay, the long awaited Basecamp API is now available. The documentation is a little on the light side, but rather straightforward. They give some examples using curl and some Ruby code to get you started. Remember that you have to explicitly enable the API for your account before it will work.

I tried some of the examples. You basically get XML responses that look something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<company>
  <name>Thinkhole Labs</name>
  <city></city>
  <zip></zip>
  <phone-number-office></phone>
  <phone-number-fax></phone>
  <country>United States</country>
  <id type="integer">235827</id>
  <address-two></address>
  <can-see-private type="boolean">true</can>
  <web-address>http://thinkhole.org</web>
  <url-name>thinkhole</url>
  <address-one></address>
  <time-zone-id>Eastern Time (US &amp; Canada)</time>
  <state></state>
</company>

So the question is, who will be the first person to make a nice Python module that handles the API in its entirety? I would imagine it won’t be long before you’ll be able to put ‘import basecamp’ at the top of your script.

I think having an open API will get a lot more people to look at their product. A very good move on their part if you ask me. Of course, 37Signals does reserve the right to “modify or discontinue, temporarily or permanently, your access to the API (or any part thereof) with or without notice.”

Ah… the joy of not owning your own applications!

Update: Here’s the announcement on the SvN blog and the API forum.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 26th, 2006 at 5:04 pm and is filed under Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Web2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.