Finally Mashape supports every existing JSON API, via an open XML specification.

Your API can now be distributed into the marketplace with thousands of hungry developers ready to hack on it, and it will have five auto-generated client libraries, an API profile with custom link for signup/login, easy authentication, and you can choose to put the addons on top of your API infrastructure: the API Request Limit and very very soon (aka, next week), a Billing addon (for selling your API). I'm looking for suggestions to create new addons :)

So if you have a JSON API, with some methods like:

  • GET http://www.myapi.com/users

    That returns, for example, the following JSON response:

  • POST http://www.myapi.com/users?name=John&email=john@myapi.com

    That may return:

You can distribute them with the following XML file:

Basically we're describing the methods available, their parameters and their response objects. There's a tool to easily generate the XML representation of response objects

Also, we have updated our open source PHP Library to support the new specification, and now developers can easily create any other implementation by following the specs.

It may be funny we're using XML to describe a JSON API, the reality is that this description is more like a document than a struct :) Also we needed to keep retro compatibility with our existing server library. JSON specs are on the roadmap.

Let me know what do you think :)