As of right now, we have frameworks, libraries, gems or examples of our provider API for Ruby, PHP, Java, Python and REALBasic.

So what’d we miss? ColdFusion of course! And a big thanks to Mark Jacobsen for writing it and letting us know about it.

We’ve posted a copy of his CFC over at Github. As always, feel free to fork it!

Just deployed a few minutes ago…

• “Generic” providers are now available. Enabling this turns off the “broadcast” API request, callbacks etc. so that you can distribute your provider API key/secret without fear. You can make any existing provider a “generic” one by choosing to edit your provider and enabling “generic” mode.
• We’re also open sourcing some of our internal tools, like deployment notifications, which utilize the new generic providers.
• Issuing a SUBSCRIBE API request will now send an email to the provided email address, if that email address isn’t in our system as an existing user.

We currently have two generic providers in place, Deployment Notifications (API key: J3Mjhwr8TuvzaBtc35mN) and Monitoring Notifications (API key: MH0S7xOFSwVLNvNhTpiC).

That’s all for today! As always, let us know if you have any feedback!

Today’s developer spotlight is @_Daver! Daver created a cool Wordpress plugin that delivers real-time notifications of new comments!

Daver first discovered Boxcar a few months ago and loved it! Being a bit of an odd duck though, he found that he wasn’t really interested in our built-in providers. Instead, he wanted to create his own. Fascinated by the possibility of sending himself push notifications via our dead simple API, Daver created his Boxcar plugin for Wordpress.

In Daver’s own words:

WP Comment Push is a Wordpress Plugin that sends every new comment on your blog to your Boxcar, resulting in a push notification on your iPhone or iPad. This is especially useful for smaller blogs that only get a few comments. It is also much faster that [sic] subscribing to your comments via RSS.

Find instructions and a quick write-up about WP Comment Push over at Daver’s blog. Note instructions in English can be found about halfway down the page.

Photo credit: lahiu at Wordcamp Hong Kong

DEVELOPERS: Want to be featured on our blog? Send us an email!

Another quick developer highlight for this week…

Sharl Morlaroll, a perl developer and Boxcar user built a really neat command-line client to send push notifications to yourself.

Use it as part of a script or use it as a way to send yourself reminders… either way it’s pretty cool and wicked simple to use:

$ boxcar-growl FromJonathan “push it push it”

Check it out on Github.

WARNING - This post is for developers, sys admins and our more technical users here at Boxcar. If you read this and have no idea what we’re talking about, we’re sorry. Frankly, we don’t even quite know what this does, so we’ll try to keep this as entertaining as we can.

Every Sunday evening (or if we’re feeling lazy, we’ll wait until Monday morning) we troll through Github to find new open source projects that are using Boxcar. Yep, it’s a regular todo item on the ole Sunday evening checklist and we’ve stumbled across some really cool stuff because of it.

About two weeks ago we came across a new plugin called “puppet-boxcar”, created by James Turnbull. It is apparently “a Puppet report handler for sending notifications of failed runs to Boxcar.”

Whew. That’s a mouthful and until about 5 minutes ago we had no idea what exactly that meant. Fortunately thanks to the power of Google, we found this magical piece:

Puppet is an enterprise systems management platform that standardizes the way IT staff deploy and manage infrastructure in the enterprise and the cloud.

By automating the provisioning, patching, and configuration of operating system and application components across infrastructure, Puppet enables IT staff to master their infrastructure even as complexity grows.

I know, right? And the best Puppet description of all:

Be the Master of your Infrastructure

Exactly.

THIS JUST IN: how about a super easy way of sending Boxcar notifications using ActionScript 3?

Yes!  It exists!  While browsing through Github the other day we happened to stumble onto Pedram Pourhossein’s awesome implementation of boxcar-as3.  The easiest way of sending notifications from all of your ActionScript widgets.

Check it out here.  And, thank you Pedram!

Checkout our User API!  It’s dead simple and an easy way to get even more value out of Boxcar if you’re a developer.

And when you’re ready to graduate to sending notifications to LOTS of people, head on over to read through our Provider API.  :)

We also just published our boxcar_api gem (checkout the source here!). It makes integrating with Boxcar just like eating cake: tasty and delicious. Or something like that.

Ruby not for you? Python fan instead? Checkout Push.py, created by Will Goring. Awesome!

I’m pleased to announce that we now also allow sending of notifications by hashed email address, in addition to the existing service token/secret method.

The original thought process behind a token/secret for each service was for those of you that wanted to allow a user to add your Provider multiple times.  In that case, each service had to have it’s own separate token/secret in order to make sure you push it to the correct service.

For those providers that only allow a single installation of their service, then pushing by the users hashed e-mail address is 1000x easier than storing the token/secret for each service.

The provider API documentation has already been updated, so be sure to check it out!