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The moving Flickr API Thursday 2006-09-14

I like free services like the Flickr image sharing service, and I’m not alone. Not only is it a easy way of sharing your photos with anyone connected to the Internet. You can choose who has access to your images or some of them, you can get them commented on if you are so inclined. And new ways for presenting your images pops up quite often. It’s a popular service and developers come up with innovative applications for selecting and presenting images all the time.

The applications rest on public API:s for authentication, and request for images in different sizes and other criteria, as how they are tagged, how popular they are, who owns the image, and so forth.

There is a problem with this, if the service endpoint, i.e. the URL of the service, is hard coded into the application. For my own flickr badge, called petikr I noticed a whilde ago, that it ceased to show any images. I thought the service was temporarily down, or bogged down. I am ashamed to admit, I didn’t discover until today, that the damage was permanent.

Sorry if you have problems with it! It is fixed now.

I googled for “flash flickr stopped working”, to see if someone had the same problem. Oh, yes. And some of them knew why and had the solution, like Doug Marttila at “Forest and Trees“, author of findr. Flickr changed its service endpoint just slightly.

I wrote a tutorial on how to build your own Flickr Flash Display, in quite a few steps, each having its own demo. all of them was compiled using Kelvin Lucks Flashr wrapper for the API. The API endpoints needed by the application is hard coded into the Flicks class of the library.

I did a lot of experimenting with Flashr at the time, and now I had to find all the correct versions of the example in my tutorial, and recompile them using the same version of the flashr library, updated with the new service endpoint.

That is hard work, and although it is nice not to have external setup files, I think maybe one should. Flash can easily read in data from a text file, XML based or not. It is good for volatile data such as developing protocols or moving web services.

• Posted in : Media
• Author : Petit