On the things we build and the things we consume.
atlas java client and watchsomething.tv
Let me introduce you to the Atlas API’s Java client hosted in its own atlas-client Github project.
We use this client extensively at MetaBroadcast and have been refining it over a number of projects. One such project is watchsomething.tv which Chris mentioned is built on Atlas. I’ll show here how the client is used to build a number of the pages in watchsomething.tv.
We’ve tried to keep the client close to the way you use the API by having item(), playlist(), and brand() methods on the client. There is then a query builder that will allow you to construct the query string, and finally Item and Playlist models, on which the client functions return lists.
For the front page of watchsomething.tv, which presents hot content that’s currently being talked about on Twitter alongside highlights from various broadcasters, it will make a query to get the long-form media that’s recently been mentioned:
And for, say, the topical mood page (which queries the news genre), the query would look like:
And that’s about it—all pages are built with queries that simple. Even more helpful, the query builder provides functions for some of the more exotic API calls beyond equalTo(), like search(), greaterThan(), lessThan(), after() and before(). This is how the auto-complete search requests are achieved in watchsomething.tv:
So, we’ve made a pretty sensible client (even for Java) but we can always do with your help. There are many ways to employ Atlas and its client and it’d be great to see the latter used in many different applications and devices. In particular, we’d love to get some feedback on how it works on Android and Google App Engine.
Go on, have a play and get in touch via Google Groups or through our Github issue tracker.
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