Announcing Stasher API

by =Pickley, Dec 6, 2012, 6:45:53 PM
Journals / Personal

As seen as deviantART seems to not respond to tickets to #dt about Application Programming Interface (API) requests quickly enough or in some cases at all, I've taken it upon my own hands to implement what I can into a third party API until deviantART realizes that these calls are necessary for real applications to built upon their API.

I've named this API, Stasher and while it is available for any developer, and I hope it helps them, it was developed primarily for use in Stash, my new Sta.sh client designed by $Ikue to gain the data that it really needed to operate in a proper manner. It is sad that a third party developer needs to implement such logical and simple calls to get basic features of an application working.

So far Stasher supports retrieving Sta.sh Writer item contents along with the ability for the developer to retrieve an item's metadata such as submission date, image size, resolution etc. These are vital pieces of data for creating a rich experience within applications in the modern age.

Example Calls

Simply pass the application, the full Stash ID of the item you wish to retrieve data from and it will return it in a nice JSON format.

Specifications and Code

Stasher is written in Ruby as a Sinatra app. You can see the code here on GitHub. It's pretty fast and will scale decently. In the future I wish to implement more calls and retrieve other data applications wish.

Feel free to open issues on the GitHub repo with suggestions or start forking and sending pull requests to be merged back into the main Stasher API.

Supporting the Third Party Developers

Even if you are not a developer, you can help us out, send in tickets to +help or developers@deviantart.com asking for these calls to implemented on the Sta.sh API, delete, full metadata and the ability for the API to return Sta.sh writer item contents. It would mean a lot to the third party community to have your backing behind us to get these calls implemented.

I am hoping that Stasher will allow other developers to expand their applications beyond what deviantART currently offers to enable richer and more engaging experiences for deviantART users on a whole.

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