We head into the weekend with a review of the stories we couldn’t cover with a look at what what going on in the world of APIs. Leading off is news from edge cloud platform, Fastly. This week they introduced a batch API for surrogate key purge. Surrogate keys let users of Fastly tag related assets such as images, audio, and copy and then purge them in a single request. The batch API extends the functionality of Fastly API by allowing you to now purge multiple surrogate keys from a site’s cache at once. An example of the API in action is a user needing to purge the index page for the tech category of their site and also the index page for the author named Joe.
curl -X POST https://api.fastly.com/service/SERVICE_ID/purge \ -H "Fastly-Key: FASTLY-API-TOKEN" \ -H "Surrogate-Key: author/joe category/tech"With one call users can now purge all related pages as shown in the example above.
Flash has been on its deathbed for years now and recently Adobe announced its plans to stop updating and distributing Flash Player at the end of 2020. In response Facebook announced that they are working to help developers that use Flash to power their games on Facebook migrate to open web standards. These standards include HTML5, supported by all major browsers today, without the need for plugin-ins, and WebGL (graphics library) with which developers can publish games from the Unity gaming engine.
Speaking of sunsetting technologies, we end with news that Wit.ai is deprecating their Bot Engine beta as its parent company Facebook rolls natural language processing (NLP) into its Messenger API. Bot Engine was originally launched in early 2016 with the goal of helping developers build text-based conversational bots. In the meantime, the bot ecosystem has advanced rapidly with many leading edge bot interactions being built for voice interfaces such as those found on Amazon Echo or Google Home. Developers have time to migrate as Bot Engine will continue to be supported until February 1st, 2018. More details for migrating are available on GitHub.