Web Africa API Released!

[MrG]

We are proud to announce the immediate availability of our newest offering: The Web Africa API. This affords developers and advanced users the ability to directly, safely and quickly automate access to the various services and facilities we provide.

We hope through the API to promote a streamlined facility for customers to create software and services that leverage enhanced end-user experiences.

Development of the API is currently focused on providing various Internet Access features, such as retrieving account usage, as well as creating, enabling and disabling accounts, though additions planned for the near future will include integration with further services such as domain and hosting management and service automation.

Documentation for the API can be found at https://api.webafrica.co.za. Please visit regularly as we continue to update the service with additional features.

WAROOP, this is WA WOOT!

Im gonna guess this can be used for like a better SASA kinda thing. One where a person can enable and disable accounts? or am I missing the point of this?

 

[Gnome]

Yeah it seems like you could, I am creating a small C# application quickly to check how hard this would be to implement...

EDIT: Hmm, very easy to use but you need a valid login for ANYTHING to work, even generating a password using the API requires a valid username and password, LOL!

For those interested here is a little example C# method to generate a random password using the WA web service. Should be real easy to implement the other web service functions as methods also.

        private string GeneratePassword(string user, string pass, int length)
        {
            const string requestURL = "https://api.webafrica.co.za/GeneratePassword";
            XmlTextReader xmlReaderObj = new XmlTextReader((requestURL+"?user="+user+"&pass="+pass+"&length="+length.ToString()+"&friendlytags=false&emit=xml"));
            while (xmlReaderObj.Read())
            {
                if (xmlReaderObj.Name.ToUpper().Equals("PASSWORD"))
                {
                    return xmlReaderObj.ReadString();
                }
            }
            return "error occured"; // No error handling :)
        }

Example method call.

string randomPassword = GeneratePassword("Your Username", "Your Password", 10);

 

[warichard]

Im gonna guess this can be used for like a better SASA kinda thing. One where a person can enable and disable accounts? or am I missing the point of this?

The API could most certainly be used to create a SASA-type application, though for end users the enabling and disabling of accounts is not implemented yet, eventually that could be done. One example of something that could be added however is purchasing of prepaid from the app.

Hmm, very easy to use but you need a valid login for ANYTHING to work, even generating a password using the API requires a valid username and password, LOL

Haha, yeah, it does perhaps sound silly to require a valid client code and password just to be able to generate a password, however we use that for logging purposes, that way we can monitor for abuse (hammering/spamming our server(s)) as well as we could do things like profile which methods are more popular, which aren't being used at all, so on and so forth.

For those interested here is a little example C# method to generate a random password using the WA web service.

Great! It's awesome seeing the community getting involved, posting samples and whatnot on how to use the API and we hope this continues to grow and proceeds to further encourage the growth of the tool development/ADSL community. We will also be posting some samples to the API site in the near future (as we have had some requests) which will give you an idea on handling errors returned from the API as well as how to tie the API into your Javascript-based AJAX/JSON web applications.

 

[Gnome]

Great! It's awesome seeing the community getting involved, posting samples and whatnot on how to use the API and we hope this continues to grow and proceeds to further encourage the growth of the tool development/ADSL community. We will also be posting some samples to the API site in the near future (as we have had some requests) which will give you an idea on handling errors returned from the API as well as how to tie the API into your Javascript-based AJAX/JSON web applications.

Unfortunately I'm a student and currently quite busy otherwise it would quite easy to write a .NET/VC++ class with error handling and everything included, but maybe one weekend if someone else hasn't done it yet

The API is a great idea, nice going!!