Andrew Powell

AirFare, developed by Joe Johnston, with the Kayak AS3 API that I wrote, has been announced as a Checkpoint 1 winner of the Ribbit Killer App Challenge.  Joe has put a lot of hard work into this app.  It's a great example of what Universal Mind's new XD team can do with RIA technologies.  Congratulations, Joe, and keep up the good work!

Head over to the Killer App Challenge page if you want to submit your entry and try for one of their cash prizes.

I attended my first 360|Flex earlier this year.  It was in my own backyard, in downtown Atlanta.  Well, now 360|Flex is returning home to where it all begain:  San Jose, CA.

The only thing I can say about 360|Flex is that it is, hands down, the most intense collection of Flex talent you will ever see in one place.  Maybe you're looking at your 2nd half conference schedule and trying to decide where to go....you can't go wrong with 360|Flex.  The sessions are great, the people are great, and the locations are generally pretty great too.  Beyond the intense sessions that you'll see ( they're all damn good ), the interaction you'll get with the rest of the Flex community can't be beaten.  You get to hang with people like:

• Ben Stucki
• Adam Flater
• Ben Clinkenbeard
• Mike & Mike from Digital Primates
• Jeff Tapper
• Laura Arguello 
• Many, Many More....

OK, so I admit my design skills suck. Even though it won the 360|Flex API Contest, the design of my Hotel Search and Call App was virtually nonexistent. Thankfully, Jeff Bouley stepped up to the plate to give the app the styling love it desperately needed over this past weekend.

Jeff did some crazy stuff with the icons, colors, layout, and just generally made it look a hell of a lot better than it did. Thanks Jeff!

Restyled App

I talked to John & Tom over at 360 Conferences asking what the outcome of the API Contest was....  They told me I didn't win.  Well damn, I had pimped the hell out of my entry.  Oh well.  I went on with my day, a bit disappointed and resolved to the staking out of Target to buy a Wii.... If they're ever in stock. 

Well, fast forward to today when Ben Clinkinbeard IMs me and asks me if my name is Tony Fendall. I was puzzled, to say the least, so he gave me a link to the contest winners.

Looks like my app, but not my name. So I think I won the contest for the Ribbit category. Stay tuned to see what really happened.

 

P.S.  I don't know who you are Tony, but I'm sure you're a nice guy and a damn fine developer too.

[UPDATE]  It was a typo, and I did, indeed, win the Wii. 

Download the Beta3 SWC I've been slack on this, but it's been a hell of a week. This has been in SVN a few days, but I'm sure most of you don't check my SVN repository all day. Beta 3 is available and it fixes a BIG bug in flight searches. I don't know why it didn't show up in Flex Builder, but oh well. Bleeding edge version is available from the SVN repository at my google code site. Download the Beta3 SWC

So, as you all know by now, I have absolutely no problem with shameless self-promotion. I got some great love from MapQuest on their developer blog. Click the link, go look at the post, and then go vote for me in the 360|Flex API Contest.

View The Application OK, so I had my nifty little hotel search app built. I decided to throw in another piece and add Ribbit to the mix, just to make it that much cooler. It was pretty easy to integrate these three technologies. The Kayak API populates the map which, in turn, can supply the phone number to the Ribbit API. It's not the prettiest app, but I think the concept is pretty cool. The cool thing for me, coming to Flex from the server-side, is that though I'm used to having a server-side call in my app (RemoteObject, etc), I can build this cool apps without having to make one RO call. Just include the SWC and use the API. It's that easy. I just submitted this to the 360|Flex API Contest. So, now I'm going to shamelessly ask you to go vote for it so I can win a Wii. You know you want to vote for me anyway. View The Application

re: Search API Let me say this up front: I like Kayak's service. I use it all the time to book flights and hotels when I travel. I'm a big fan of Kayak. I came across your API just by chance when googling "Kayak API" in hopes that you actually had published an API. To my surprise, you in fact had actually published an API and had documentation. A good start. I decided to take a look at it and give it a try. It looked simple enough and with some work in ColdFusion and Flex, I was able to get some working API ports for these languages up and running. Through the course of my testing and building, I come to find out that the API has not been updated in a while, is not fully documented, and is not exactly what I'd call reliable when it comes to availability. When I presented these issues to you, as a concerned developer, the response I got was: "You'll notice that we've removed mention of the Kayak XML Search API from http://kayak.com/labs/ we did this because of poor monetization for the affiliates who were using it." So, if I read this correctly, you basically stopped advertising your Search API because you weren't making any money off it, correct? Affiliates, obviously, will make money when you make money off of the Search API. Is it really honest and fair to say affiliates weren't making money (which may have been the case) when the fact, the root of the matter is that you weren't making any money off of it? I think not. There are a TON of travel apis on the market. Just take a look at www.programmableweb.com. You'll see at least 7 other travel based APIs. Either get your act together or shut down your API. If you embrace the RIA developer (i.e. Flex and AJAX) and provide us a good, working API, you can almost guarantee two things: tons of free publicity and a ton of killer apps written that will drive traffic and revenue to your site. It works for a ton of other services, why not yours? All I want is for you to give us something we can work with, is supported, and is well documented, and is reliable. Comments are open if you'd like to voice your opinions and/or respond.

Download the SWC A few days ago, I released the ColdFusion version of my Kayak Search API. Well, as the night follows day, along comes the AS3 version for use in your Flex applications. It provides much of the same functionality as the CF version, but does not have any facilities for searching airport codes, cities, or airline codes. I must say, that it was interesting building this library because there are some subtle differences to doing something in CF then porting it to AS3. I really like the way the AS3 version came together, because the event driven model flows a bit better, in my mind. If you want to mashup the AS3 version and the ColdFusion version, I have done something to make it very easy to do. The AS3 value objects are a direct port from the CFC value objects. So you could, in theory, write a remoting call to the ColdFusion server in your Flex code that talks to a remoting facade in the ColdFusion code. This would give you the same functionality, but the data calls and processing are done on the server. It's your choice. The source code for this is available on my Google Code Site. You will also find a flight search sample and a hotel search sample on there in a separate project called "KayakSamples". Kayak API spec Happy Searching. p.s. ASDocs are coming.... Download the SWC

View The Application Download the Code OK, so I got my AS3 API for Kayak out the door. After I posted it, I started thinking... "People are going to wonder what this can do...." So I whipped up a mashup very quickly with the help of the MapQuest API that Universal Mind developed. Basically, since Kayak returns Latitude / Longitude pairs with the hotel data, we can send that into the MapQuest API as points to display on the map. We can also feed information about that point in with the lat/lon. So, I looped the data coming back from Kayak and added it to the MapQuest map. No server-side data calls needed. All done with free, publicly available APIs. I think it's pretty slick, and yes, I know my design skills SUCK. All I was concerned with is a functionality demo. Comments are open. View The Application Download the Code