CategoryAPI

July 30, 2014 — Like most web developers, I spend my days giving instructions to computers. These instructions generally involve some input (a request for a web page), some logic (get the right content from a database) and some output (send the content to the requesting browser). This process of telling a computer how to perform a task, such as generating a web page, is what we commonly call “programming,” but it’s only a subset of programming: imperative programming. Read more…

November 13, 2013 — The Web has succeeded at interoperability and scale in a way that no other technology has before or since. Still, the Web remains far from “state of the art”, and it is being increasingly threatened by walled gardens. The Web platform often lags competitors in delivering new system and device capabilities to developers. Read more…

February 9, 2012 — Are you fascinated by dynamic data? Do you go green with envy when you see tweets pulled magically into websites? Trust me, I’ve been there. Read more…

September 5, 2011 — PayPal is the most popular platform for receiving online payments today. The ease of opening a PayPal account and receiving payments compared to opening a merchant account with a traditional payment gateway is probably the number one reason for its popularity, with a close second being the comprehensive API that PayPal provides for its payment services. In this post, I will break down some of the techniques and approaches to working with the PayPal API, in order to make integration and troubleshooting simpler and easier. Read more…