Some customer feedback on the OpenSRS API
At OpenSRS, we’re always happy to get feedback from our resellers. Our technical delivery teams work hard to make sure we have some of the most reliable and advanced technology available to our resellers. Our OpenSRS API is no exception. This week, Chris, a developer with one of our domains resellers, wrote to us with this feedback about our API:
“I can’t say enough good things about the OpenSRS API. It’s easy to understand, well laid out and gives examples! Our goal was to be able to do as much as we could via API. With the OpenSRS API “as much as we could” turned into everything. I honestly expected the tools development to take me past our go live date. I was wrong – our tools are ready now and we’re really looking forward to using them.
The major difference in the OpenSRS API is that it uses xml instead of a strict URL post. With a URL post, all the information must be in the URL and, as I’m sure you can imagine, those URLs can get very long. Another differentiator with the OpenSRS API is that entries don’t require complete information sets and most of the time entries can be done in one step. For example, when I’m writing a script to update a domain’s complete contact info, I only need to generate one xml file from the script and it’s done super fast. With other APIs, I have to have the script generate a long URL and connect with that long URL to update part of the info first, then I have to send another even longer URL to update the rest of the domain info. That method is much slower and takes forever.
I also like how the OpenSRS API is modular. Once I understood what was required of the xml and connection – which didn’t take long thanks to the documentation – I could simply copy/paste the heart of the script into the next script I was writing and only change a few values. Bam, another script was born!
One thing I really like about the OpenSRS system, not specific to the API, is the way you guys handle the security of the system. The use of an md5 key to encrypt the xml instead of just using the account login information is awesome and makes things really easy and very secure.
I have to say that there really isn’t much that you guys leave out of your API. With the tools I’ve written we won’t have to use the RWI at all because your API covers everything with the exception of maybe two things: we’d like to have the ability to add notes to a domain name. The get_notes feature is awesome and I’m sure we’ll be using this a great deal every day and if we could add our own notes that would only make it better. We’d also like to see the ability to run reports like domains transferred out, domains transferred in, renewals, etc. We can do this now via the RWI but we’d love the ability to do this via API.”
We’d love to hear your experiences with our API. Drop us a line in the comments and let us know how we’re doing.
Thanks to Flickr user kalledoo for the snazzy photo and for releasing it under Creative Commons so we could share it.
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