Ribbit API

I’ve been fiddling around with Ribbit the past couple days and trying to figure out how to integrate it with the Consona CRM platform. Ribbit has an incredibly full featured API and is developed primarily with Adobe Flex so I’ve had to do a crash course on the side but it hasn’t been all that bad. The Adobe Flex Builder leverages Eclipse so if you’ve used Eclipse IDE for development in the past (Java, Aptana, etc…) it’s really a piece of cake. The SDK that Ribbit provides also has some great examples.

Functionally, Ribbit easily replaces the Consona CRM CTI toolbar. What I need to figure out is how to integrate a user logging into to Ribbit as a user of the Consona system and then be able to track incoming and outcoming phone calls to the customer records in CEDB. Unfortunately I’ve been sidetracked with some other issues the past couple days so I haven’t been able to give my full attention to this side project but I’ll post updates in the future.

What has suprised me is the lack of attention that Ribbit has received in the marketplace. It was acquired by BT a little while ago and they’ve been quietly been release newer versions but the potential of this API is great.

Ruby On Rails

Design patterns and web application frameworks are topics that I wish I paid more attention to during my Computer Science courses in college. What didn’t seem important at the time has a lot of relevancy in the projects that I work on these days.

So recently I’ve started to go back and re-learn and play around with some of the basic design patterns as well as delve into some of the latest web application frameworks that are out there. “Ruby On Rails” is one that I’ve recently been playing around with that has some pretty cool features and a pretty active developer base from what I can see. Though there has been some news lately about scalability issues with Rails but from what I can see so far it does offer some impressive features to help speed up and make web development more efficient.

.NET , PHP, or Java

As a sales engineer, I’m in a strange position where I need stay ahead of the latest technologies in order to know how to communicate how my product can fit into their technology stack. The majority of the code base at work relies on .NET and ASP but I often hear about a prospects or client using  PHP, Java, and other open source technologies in their environment. Constantly switching back and forth does present a challenge but in the end it’s what I have to do.

AuthSub token has wrong scope

I was playing around with the Google Data API last night and I kept running into this error. The app I’m creating allows me to pull down a list of Google Calendars and then insert a new entry into the calendar that I select. Pulling the list was the easy part, adding a new entry was the tough part.

My problem was that I was declaring a ‘scope’ that was too limiting for any additional calls to the API. Instead of declaring the scope for ‘allcalendars’, I reduced the scope to the largest URI possible which is ‘http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds’

Be sure to read this this doc about using AuthSub with JavaScript before diving into the Google Data API http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/authsub-js.html