Overview

ONEsite’s REST (Representational State Transfer) API offers a quick, easy, effective and rapid method to remotely access commonly used functionality of the ONEsite Social Networking Platform. Using a REST call,formatted in a similar manner to the familiar Internet URL, you are able to request information directly from ONEsite servers from your servers.

The responses from these calls to the ONEsite REST API can be blended directly with your own service offerings to give you a high degree of control and flexibility over how you present your service to your clients. For example, you could host your own blog postings pages while using the ONEsite REST API to handle comments or an RSS feed of the blog postings.

The Benefits of the REST API

The ONEsite platform is built upon the concepts of horizontal scalability and a service-oriented-architecture. We use our own web services internally to construct the web pages and features on standard social network.The ONEsite REST API provides improved response times and reliability due to load balancing and integrated support for caching. Additionally, REST improves server scalability by reducing the need to maintain communication state. This means that different servers can be used to handle initial and subsequent requests. Furthermore, as these requests are handled, less client-side software is required to be written because a single browser can access any application and any resource.Any modern programming language can utilize the data generated by the ONEsite REST API. Because all services are requested by a URL and all data is returned as XML the underlying programming language is not significant. ONEsite partners utilize Java, PHP, .NET, Python, Ruby and other programming languages to integrate with ONEsite.

Examples of REST Uses

Our partners use the ONEsite REST services to achieve custom visual and/or functional effects and to integrateONEsite content and functionality into external sites and systems.

  • Contesting – Create a custom contest page combining services for Uploading Photos, Rating Photos, and

Posting Comments

  • Design – Create an Adobe Flash movie to be embedded on another web page which uses the Photo

Service to load the highest rated photos from the social network

  • Syndication – Bring blog posts, calendar events and other elements into another webpage using RSS

Accessing the REST Services

The ONEsite REST services may be accessed from a number of different locations:

  • Client Browser – i.e. a directly link to a REST RSS feed for a Blog RSS chiclet; using REST inside of a Adobe Flash file to load image thumbnails for a particular contest gallery
  • ONEsite Platform
    • Modules – ONEsite modules may access the REST API and then format the resulting XML
    • Pages – Pages running through the ONEsite filter may access REST for advanced functionality
  • Third Party Sites – ONEsite partners may access the REST services to bring social network functionality and/or data into pages or services hosted externally

ONEsite Support

We provide documentation and assistance along the way to answer questions you may have in accessing the API and using it to achieve your goals. We are always available to quickly answer questions, fulfill requests and provide any additional information that you may need in using our services.ONEsite has development resources available if you need access to a web service not discussed in this document or if you need development assistance to integrate with your information systems or those of a third party.