Since we're on about APIs lately, the Development Seed blog's description [warning: geeky] of using our API to internationalize StandAgainstPoverty.org by melding Salsa and Drupal is a timely comment.

Beautiful.

'My son,' the father said, 'you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.'

-Luke 15:31-32

It's time to slay the fatted calf.

As a hybrid nonprofit/tech provider, DIA's animating vision has always been empowering nonprofits. Open APIs have been a bedrock assumption of that understanding since day one: as our guy put it on last year's Open API debate, "nonprofits can do more than vendors can imagine they can do".

Kintera and Convio just got a little religion, too. And since we're not above glorying in converts, we're excited to see the big commercial players starting to come around.

Judi Sohn and Michelle Murrain have more about those announcements. Allan Benamer has some thoughts from a coders' standpoint.

Personally, I'm pretty much in Beth's boat -- "wouldn't know an API from Ape if it stood right in front of me beat its chest".

Above: an image capture of a third-party application that increments a counter based on data pulled from our API

But I've seen some groups use our API to do some pretty cool stuff, often stuff we had no idea they were doing.

Mashing up with outside applications, custom data sets and (of course) Google maps.

Radically customizing pages -- even reworking DIA-hosted pages.

Content management integration.

Arranging custom database syncs.

I first came across Salsa's API quite by accident. As the lead programmer for TriggerID, I was looking to try and integrate one of our products, CampaignWindow, with Salsa for the Young Democrats of America. Many YD chapters around the country are using CampaignWindow for their web presence but also use Salsa (known internally as DEMopolis) for their membership lists, etc.

In poking around Salsa I noticed it had a link in the footer for Developers which contained cut-and-paste code for a form clients could use on their site to add users. Wondering if I might be able to automate this, on a hunch I did a Google search for "DIA API" and came across this. [The non-Google path to our documentation hive is here. -ed.]

This was a gold mine, listing all tables and associated field names, and though the documentation was all geared towards how to interface with your data via web forms, I decided to try and see if a silent HTTP POST would work too. Setting up a test was easy enough, but due to not knowing one crucial piece of information, it didn't work and I spent several hours trying to figure out what I did wrong. Here's the initial code (in ColdFusion):

Democracy In Action is building a Salsa connectivity module for the open source CMS Drupal, but that's only part of the picture. We are actively collaborating with our user and developer communities to provide open APIs and libraries so that external systems can leverage and integrate the open structure of Salsa and DIA's high-performance CRM services. This collaboration has already yielded a number of successes -- DIA tools have been integrated with Drupal and Plone, and a comprehensive set of PHP libraries is close to release -- but we want to work with our community to provide tools for all of the languages that they use. If you are a developer hoping to integrate Salsa and DIA services with Ruby on Rails, Python, Perl, .NET, or anything else, let's work together to keep growing the progressive community's best set of online engagement tools!

You can create a custom sign up box for your Myspace page so that your new friends can sign up for your list with one click.

Then, your new friends will be automatically entered into your DIA Headquarters into a group you've created just for them. This way, you'll be able to see who's signing up through your Myspace account and easily contact them later.

Here's how to do it:

1. Go to your DIA headquarters and create a new group for your Myspace signups. Be sure to copy the group key, a number found at the end of your URL when viewing your new group. It will look something like this:

https://secure.democracyinaction.org/YOURSHORTNAME/hq/groups.jsp?groups_KEY=47223

So, in this case, you need to copy the 47223. We'll use it later.

2. Go to your Myspace account, and click " Edit profile"
Paste the code below into your " About me" section. Be sure to change all the placeholders with your org key, your Myspace URL, and your group key.

We promised an example of someone making great use of DemocracyInAction's coding flexibility. This isn't only that. Brave New Films' web site for its flick Wal-Mart: The High Cost of a Low Price is as tightly designed a site as you'd ever want to see. And their villainous take on the Wal-Mart smiley might have you waking up in a sweat at night.

For their house party event, they're using our API to pass data from their own pages. This is something you've gotta do on your own -- it's not for everyone, but it's brilliant if you can program it.