Introducing the CurdBee API
CurdBee started as something we wrote to scratch a personal itch. Invoicing was a pain for us as a small business, and soon realising that many other SMEs and freelancers out there shared the same sentiments, we released CurdBee as a web application. Of course, in such a setting, our initial focus was to release a minimal viable product. We cut out a lot, and left a lot for later – CurdBee was released with a few core features. It worked, and people loved it, but they wanted more.
As the months went by, the feature requests kept piling up in our inboxes, and we worked hard to keep up with the demand. Features such as Estimates, Recurring profiles and payment gateways came in the form of Modules. Meanwhile, we continually updated our core product, giving both the Standard and PRO versions more and more functionality.
However, features alone will only make a web app good. To be a great web app, we needed to work well with others.
The web of today is not the web we first stepped into. Times have changed, and the signal now goes further than we would have ever imagined. Mashups, integrations, whatever you want to call them, the web of today has applications merging and sharing, talking to each other and exchanging data in a way that enriches the lives of their users.
Today, CurdBee enters that fray. With the launch of our new API, we’re opening our world to yours.
We had to modify both the application and our infrastructure and it took some time because we wanted to ensure reliability, while maintaining the flexibility that you have come to love from CurdBee. The learning curve isn’t steep at all, and basically, if you know how HTTP works, you can start playing with the API right away.
In order to do so however, you’ll need to request an API token. You can do this by logging into CurdBee, going to Settings > Account Information and clicking on the Request API Access link. Your request will go into our queue and we’ll review your account before granting or denying you access. We are putting this approval process in place because we want our most loyal users to be able to start developing without having to worry about server load and security issues. Of course, eventually the API will be available for everyone! Till then though, send those requests in and get coding right away.
Speaking of coding, for developers, we have documentation available and for Ruby devs in particular, we’ve put together an official CurdBee gem. To install it just run sudo gem install curdbee from your command prompt. If you’d like to have a poke at gem our code, or even contribute your own patches grab the source from GitHub.
Of course, it goes without saying that as with any initial release, there are bound to be glitches, and certainly room for improvement. So do let us know if you run into any issues or if you see anything we can better. As with any part of CurdBee, the API will evolve based on what you want from it so please feel free to give us feedback via our support section. For issues specific to the CurdBee Ruby gem, you can use the issues section on our GitHub repository.
