I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned either here or on my personal blog that we’re going to have an API for Approver.com soon. After mulling it over for a few weeks, I’ve settled on rolling this out in three phases.
First, I want to release some kind of client application that utilizes our API before we make the API itself generally available. This will (99% certainty) be a Yahoo Widget for Approver.com alerting. You’ll be able to install this on your desktop and it’ll tell you when you need to come back to Approver.com to review or approve a document. I did some design work on this widget last night and I have to say that the ratio of its appearance to my feeble design skills is fairly high. (Fortunately if you don’t like the way it works, you’ll be more or less free to remix and re-engineer it to your liking, which is the whole point of having an API.)
After we’ve released the alerting widget, we’ll make some read-only APIs available. This will include the call used by the widget to retrieve your list of actionable documents, and it will also include some calls we’ll need for secure authentication and authorization (we are going to use the same kind of scheme that eBay, Flickr, and others use to authenticate users through third-party applications without having to share user credentials with third-party developers).
Finally, after we’re comfortable with how we’ve made our initial read-only APIs available, we’ll release some read/write APIs (such as the ability to approve a document programmatically, invite users to review documents, and possibly also upload/edit documents).
I want to approach this conservatively because I won’t want to release something then find myself having to change it after developers have started using because something about it wasn’t quite right.
If you’re a coder and you’d like early access to any of this, please let us know.
