I've recently been working an libraries for various languages to access and make use of the Jambase API. Why? Well, for one thing, I love live music. For another, I believe that being able to create a mashup or something similar that incorporates live music is pretty useful. Jambase is a pretty unique service and the amount a data that it provides is staggering.

To date, I've released Jambase4R, a framework-agnostic Ruby library and Jambase4J, a Java library. Both confirm to similar interfaces and make accessing the Jambase API simple.

Today, I released Jambase4Net, which allows .NET developers to access the API. It's quite simple to use, as this Gist shows:

Hopefully that pretty straightforward. Have a look at the source for more details and feel free to fork it.

I've just recently committed an update to an older plugin of mine - JamBase4Rails. It's now called JamBase4R and is not tied to any specific framework. It can be used with Rails or Sinatra and will include specific portions automatically, however.

What is JamBase4R?

It's a Ruby library designed for simple interaction with the JamBase online live music service API. It makes it ridiculously simple to integrate a search for live music into your Ruby application.

Configuring JamBase4R

Using JamBase4R In Your App

That's really all there is to it! Feel free to try it out or fork it and let me know what you think of it. As a side note, JamBase4Rails will be deprecated soon.

I'm not sure why, but I've never paid much attention to Gists. Gists are pasted code snippets hosted by GitHub. You can see them here. It's a service similar to PasteBin or one of the others, but it offers more, including versioning, branching, etc. To be honest, though, what I really like is the ability to embed a Gist into my blog, like so:

I really like this approach because it removes the requirement for syntax highlighting within the blog code. Additionally, when I update a Gist, that change is reflected on the blog.

Recently I've commited a new Ruby library called Gistr that allowed developers using Rails or Sinatra to embed Gists into their views. It's a really simple library and probably not of any great use to anyone, but I thought it was fun. It could easily be extended to add functionality to other Ruby web frameworks. Feel free if you find it useful.

The main point of this post is that maybe things like Google syntax highlighter are unecessary when you can just embed a Gist.

A few days ago, I posted about hating the colors and look of my site. Well, I finally sat down and made some changes. I think it looks cleaner and simpler now.

In my last post, I discussed issuing a GET request to a web API, downloading and converting the response to a string and creating JSONObjects from it. The next step is to create your domain specific objects from the JSON.

Here's an example:

The process is pretty simple. Loop over the JSONObjects and build up you domain specific objects. Then they can be freely used within your Android app.