Evri Blog

I’m excited to announce the launch of our new JavaScript API.  We’ve been using the JavaScript API internally for quite some time, for example, our widgets are built on this flexible and easy to use web API. It feels great to finally open it up to the Evri development community.

The Evri Javascript API utilizes JSONP to make web service requests to Evri’s RESTful API. The JSONP requests are augmented with a set of callbacks similar to those used in many cross-browser Javascript libraries for handling AJAX requests. This allows the Evri Javascript API to return first class objects back to the calling Javascript code without your needing to parse or traverse the JSON returned by Evri’s RESTful API.

Amongst other places, you can check the JavaScript API out in action on a fun new mashup called The Summarizer available at: www.thesummarizer.com. The Summarizer lets you see entities (people, places, or things) present in Twitter tweets about a topic, or by a given Tweeter. For example, you can find entities contained within the latest tweets by @cnn, or all entities in tweets about the Iran Elections. In addition, The Summarizer lets you pivot on one of these related entities, to find other tweets, images, videos, articles, etc. In short, its a great way to explore highly related information to something going on right now, in real time.

So how does it use the Evri JavaScript API? According to Carlos, the rockin developer behind The Summarizer:

We instantiate a Session object which we use for all API calls. We get a TweetsList object by calling Tweet.findFromUsername and findForQuery as needed. The TweetsList has a list of the entities (i.e. people, places and things present in tweets) but it doesn’t have all requisite entity information such as entity descriptions. We retrieve an EntityList by using getEntityDetails. The EntityList has entity names and descriptions. The EntityList is then used to populate the left column. We bind each list item to its respective Entity object. When you click on an entity we make the following calls depending on what right side tab is selected:

• entity.media.getImages is called to populate the Images tab
• entity.media.getVideos is called to populate the Videos tab
• entity.media.getArticles is called to populate the Articles tab
• entity.getRelations to populate the ‘More About’ tab
• entity.getTweetsAbout to populate the Tweets tab

And voila, that’s it. You can read all about the API in the JavaScript API documentation. And as always, ask any question, and please give us feedback on our developer forum.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 31st, 2009 at 2:45 pm and is filed under API. 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.