The life of developers is arguably more exciting than ever before – with so many different services only an API call, it is possible for developers to deliver upon what were only dreams a few short years ago. But all of those services, and all of those hundreds of APIs mean that developers have to contend with an ever increasing degree of complexity across multiple APIs and multiple languages.
This is where Temboo steps in. Temboo wants to help developers create and automate interactions between varied data sets. It does so by using the notion of a “choreography” Temboo’s name for pre-built data workflows. Temboo has create an entire library of these “choreos” and ties them to a visual designer all within a browser-based dashboard. With Temboo, a developer can test a Choreo within the browser to test its functionality or down load the Temboo SDK (currently supporting Java, PHP, Python and Ruby) and insert the Temboo code directly into their own application code. These ready-to-use processes are designed to make API integration easy, taking care of authentication, credential management and updates. Right now, the Temboo Library has Choreos for over 70 APIs.
Temboo actally makes sense, they’re abstracting all the niggly details of building to an API away from developers and enabling the sort of visual mashing up of data that Yahoo Pipes tried to do a few years ago. The fact that Pipes never realy took off is perhaps a reflection of the fact that it comes out of Yahoo! rather than any reflection on the product itself. I used Pipes to build some custom data feeds and it was quick, easy and fun. Temboo would seem to take those attributes and add in many more service APIs, and additionally allow developers to extract raw code to insert into their own applications.
Temboo is currently in it’s beta testng phase and accounts are currently free. Signing up gets a developer 10000 calls to temboo per month and 500MB of bandwidth – it’ll be interesting to see how this one develops.
