Welcome to the Mashery Product Blog.  We will be using this space to blog about new product features and developments.  A list of recent posts will appear on the summary page in your dashboard. You may also wish to  subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog.

We are pleased to announce that on Tuesday June 17th we will be rolling out our new Content Management System (CMS) for administration of your Mashery Powered Developer Portal.    The update will happen at 1:00pm (pacific).  The upgrade will result in no system down time and will take less than a minute to complete.

New CMS features and upgrades include:

• WYSIWYG Interface for page creation and editing
• Create and update custom pages, documentation and blogs
• Create stylized and rich pages quickly and easily
• Add code blocks, custom CSS and javascript for each page
• Tabbed page editing. Keep multiple pages open to switch back and forth during editing
• File upload
• Ability to do Internationalization of pages " Please contact us for more information on this

We have several customers that have been actively using the new CMS in beta and have provided a great deal of testing and feedback.   We expect this upgrade will significantly simplify Portal administration via the Dashboard.

As part of the conversion to the new CMS system, we are deprecating the markdown markup format in favor of HTML.  We will automatically convert existing markdown documents to HTML using the same algorithm that we use to display these documents today.  There will be no change in the presentation of your content.  Markdown is still available for wiki documents.

September 7, 2008

Here in San Francisco, we're just coming out of our usual foggy summers and are headed into the beautiful weather period where the fog makes way for blue skies every day.  We took advantage of those foggy summer days and worked really hard to release cool new features and get some great customers up and running with their API programs.  Speaking of customers, in the coming month, you'll see some API launch announcements from some more pretty great new Mashery clients.  But I digress (can't help it, we're really excited). 

So what have we been up to these past six weeks since launching our new CMS?  Tons.  Here's a break down of new features that have been released:

• Protocol Translation - built a feature that allows us to more quickly extend your API with additional protocols so your developers can code to their preference without you needing to build it yourself.  Have a SOAP API already but want REST or XML/RPC? Call us.
  
• oAuth - we can help you if you don't want to build oAuth support yourself.  We'll generate, manage and validate your user access tokens.  This standard is becoming more popular and is a great way to protect your customers' sensitive data.
• Email Notification Settings - if you haven't seen it already, log into the Dashboard, navigate to Settings and then the Notifications tab. Add yourself to the bcc: anytime a developer signs up or registers for a key.  Or customize the email content that is sent to your developers during registrations.
• Application Registration Form Flexibility - more easily add or remove fields from the application and key registration pages.

Last but not least, our reporting team has been cranking the hours all summer working on our exciting new reporting platform.  We have some final kinks to work out, but it's getting very close now.  Have a sneak peak at method level reporting for a single developer... we hope you like it!

September 10, 2008

Today we released a few Developer Portal enhancements that are likely to strike a chord with many of our clients. 

1. Single Sign On using SAML.  Optionally enabled, with an ability to map your user/member information into relevant Mashery member attributes, this feature provides a friendlier experience for developers that already have accounts on your other website.  Give us a call or send a note to support@mashery.com if you'd like to explore enabling it for your Mashery Developer Portal.
2. Documentation Sorting.  In the Dashboard CMS (content management system), we've enhanced the Documentation feature to allow you to sort folders and pages more easily.  In prior releases, folders would sort based on alphanumeric order, forcing some of you to use numbering prefixes to sort the way you wanted.  You may now drag folders where you wish them to appear in the documentation nav aid.  Sorting is done by your placement, not alphanumeric order.  You still won't be able to drag Documentation Pages into other folders, but we'll get that one later...
3. Documentation Navigation Aid.  The documentation nav aid has been improved to include previous/next/up controls so your developers may read the documentation more like a book rather than requiring a click on the nav aid page links.  If you wish these controls to be removed from your site, let us know and we'll do it for you.
4. CMS Performance. Drastic improvement in CMS load performance for large documentation sites.
   

Finally, tell us what you think about posting this information via this support Blog.  Is this a good way for you to keep in touch with Mashery product information?  Got another idea? Post to the comments or send us an email at support@mashery.com.

Thanks!  More coming!

September 30, 2008

We are pleased to announce the launch of our Reporting 2.0 capabilities!

Our old system served our clients and Mashery well, but it was definitely starting to feel its age.  As we got closer to this launch, it's been acting up on us as its final protest of its pending retirement.  We will be raising a toast here in the office to the legacy system as we bid it farewell and welcome in the new.

We believe this new platform and the reports we've produced for our initial launch will be of great benefit to our clients as you embark on taking your APIs to the next level.   You will find significant improvements in the data we collect, the types of charts, the ability to drill into some developer details, and just the visual appeal of the new pages.  Our hope is they will allow you to better support your developers, better mine business development opportunities, assist in business processes like billing, and focus your development efforts towards actual demand.

Some highlights of our new capabilities:

• Developer Detail. Interested in what a specific developer is up to?  Drill into the developer to see their application registration details alongside of charts for their volumes, error code counts, and top methods.

• Method Level Detail.  You may now review the methods your developers are calling as we have a Top 5 Methods chart both at the API and Developer levels.

• Flexible Date Ranges. Previously, we were limited to specific dates or week long date ranges.  In this version, pick your own ranges, or select by date range templates like "Last Quarter" or "Last Month".

• Near Real Time.  Previously, calls from today would first show up the following day, and weekly reports were run on the weekends only.  In this version, reporting data is continually indexed, getting close to 15-30 minute lag times.  It really just depends on how much data we're crunching.

• Extraction to CSV. All charts have a download to CSV link.  Most will return full details relevant to that chart.  For example, the Top 5 Methods chart returns data for all methods and their volume counts.

• Data as of July 1, 2008. The reporting system has data starting from Q2 2008, or July 1, 2008.

In addition to how excited we are about this release, we're equally pleased with how the architecture came together.  We'll be able to add new charts easily and in the near future, produce custom reports/charts for our clients.  On that note, tell us what you think of this release.  What did we do well?  What did we miss?  What should we focus on next?  Post your ideas or feedback into our forums.

For those of you that see less than meaningful method level charts, contact your Client Services Manager or support@mashery.com to work with us to configure your API proxy to index the appropriate data.

Update 10/27/2008 8am: All reporting data is now displayed as expected.  The 2 week gap period is resolved.

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Update 10/24/2008 4pm: Reporting data is back and accurate for recent activity.  We are still working on getting data displayed for approximately a 2 week period.  So currently, July 1 - Today with the exception of Oct 1-15th, 2008.

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Please note, an upgrade to our new reporting system infrastructure is taking longer than we expected.  Thus, currently, reporting results are inaccurate.  You will see complete days as missing and volumes for days that display are much lower than they should be. 

Based on current progress, we expect this problem to be resolved by early afternoon Pacific time.  We apologize for any inconvenience.  We'll advise when the upgrade completes and the results as back to normal.

A small but valuable feature was released this week and is available for all clients. The Mashery Proxy service now supports gzip.  This feature has two control options.  Firstly, developer applications may submit calls with HTTP gzip content-encoding directives and the proxy service will pass these through to our customer API endpoints. 

Secondly, we have an option to force gzip compression between Mashery and our customer APIs.  This second option is valuable in situations where the API response size is large, performance may be improved via compression, and you cannot control whether developers are using gzip content-encoding directives.  With this option, by endpoint, we force compression to occure between your API and Mashery so at least performance between us is improved, which may translate into overall performance improvement for your developers and may reduce some of your capacity needs.

Send a mail off to support@mashery.com should you wish to enable it or ask questions in our forum about this feature.

A bug has been identified that is causing some client's reporting environment to be unavailable.  We have taken the feature offline for the moment while we resolve the issue.  We expect the feature to be available again in the next few hours.  We will keep you posted.

Short but sweet posting - reports online.

We were working with another client recently and found that we had a little weakness around how we provide error message responses back to calling apps for some protocols.  As you may know, our API Proxy Service handles a number of your business rules like rate limits, throttling, security and so on.  When one of these rules fail, or there is generally a technical problem with the call, we respond immediately back to the caller with some type of error response.  And we've always allowed you to customize the error responses to meet your needs. 

As is pretty common in REST APIs, in order to make development a bit easier, many will allow the developer to request a preferred response format.  So if you like looking at XML more than JSON, for many APIs, add a parameter or some indicator of some kind to the call (e.g. "?output=JSON" or "/method.xml") and you get your responses in the format you wish.  Good stuff, but we found a little problem in our app.  The custom error formatting feature only allowed you to serve up one.  So we could respond with JSON, but not XML for example.  So while you were responding with JSON, every once in a while when they got an error, they'd get Mashery XML.  We fixed that today.

Now, you can define what we call an "Error Set".  You can then define the logic for picking the Error Set to respond with based on attributes of the call.  Simple little feature, but one that makes your developer's experience much tighter.  Have a look and contact us at support@mashery.com if you have any questions.

Step 1: Define your Error Sets.  The Error Set Name should be a value that your developers will use in their call.

Step 2: Configure your endpoint. Select the Default Error Set for cases where the developer doesn't ask for something specific.  Then set the Selection Logic for picking the error format that your developer may request.  If your accepting params in the GET or POST of a call, enter the param name.  If you are using a resource type, such as api.mashery.com/search.xml, select the "Resource Type" selection logic and no value is necessary in the Selection Location field. 

We are pleased to announce a major upgrade to the editor in the CMS. While we were upgrading the editor, we were able to sneak in a few other improvements (thanks David!).  The following summarizes some of the changes.  We hope you like them!

1. New Body Editor: we've implemented a new editor in the CMS. You'll see many new action buttons that offer some nice functionality.  For example, there is a set of table management tools so you don't need to write HTML to include tables on your page.  The old HTML view toggle button has been replaced with a pop-up window so you may see both the HTML and resulting page at the same time.  There are a few formatting features also for inserting block indents, subscript/superscript, strikethroughs, etc.  And finally a nice text find and replace feature!

2. More Editing Space: there are two new ways to get more screen real estate for editing your content.  First, the documentation tree can be hidden via toggle.  Second, while editing the page body, you may enter into full screen mode which hides everything but the body editor.

3. File Manager: many people were confused about how to upload files to their site so we pulled the file upload capability out of the page body section and placed it in the action bar.

4. Folder Creation Change: moved the "Create Folder" action out of the "New Item" action list and into the folder viewer page.

Here is a sample screen shot.  Log on and check it out!

Mashery Clients,

Please be advised that Mashery will have a partial service outage for maintenance purposes this Saturday, January 10th, from 9:00-9:30pm Eastern Standard Time.   During this period, the following services will be unavailable for routine system maintenance:

1. Client Developer Portals
2. Mashery API

Please note, the Mashery API Proxy Service will continue to operate normally and no developer calls to your API will be impacted. Please contact support@mashery.com or your Client Services Manager with any questions. 

Thank You

Our reporting team made a nice little improvement to two of the Reports Dashboard csv extracts today. 

1. Top 5 Error Response Codes: the chart still will show the top 5, but the csv extract now includes data for all error codes and counts in the time period.  Previously, it only extracted the top 5 error responses.
2. Top 5 Method Calls: the chart still will show the top 5 method calls, but the csv extract now includes data for all methods and counts in the time period.  Previously, it only extracted the top 5 method calls.

Let us know what you think.

Another nice improvement from David on our reporting team was released.  The API Usage summary sparklines have been improved on the Reporting->Overview page to include a count of "Other Responses".  We also modified the hint tips next to each sparkline to better explain what is included in each count. 

Previously, we only displayed "Successful Calls" and "Blocked Calls".  The "Other Responses" sparkline contains all of the other types of call results.  Typically, this is a much smaller number than the successful and blocked calls, but possibly still interesting to you.  It will include call responses such as timeouts, errors, resource not founds, redirects, and so on. 

Here's an example of the new version of this chart:

As always, feedback is welcome!

Please be advised that we will be performing maintenance on our Reporting system early Sunday morning from 3:00am-4:00am Eastern.  The Reporting system will still be available during this time period, however, data updates will be disabled so your reports will be slightly older than normal. 

Thank you for your understanding.  Please send questions to support@mashery.com or contact your Client Services Manager.

Mashery Clients,

Please be advised that Mashery will have a partial service outage for maintenance purposes this Sunday morning from 12:00am-2:00am Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).   During this period, the following services will be unavailable for routine system maintenance:

1. Client Developer Portals
2. Mashery API

Please note, the Mashery API Proxy Service will continue to operate normally and no developer calls to your API will be impacted. Please contact support@mashery.com or your Client Services Manager with any questions.

Thank You

Update:

ATTN Mashery Customers:

Please be advised that the disruption to our standard infrastructure has now been resolved and we are running under normal operations again.  All failed over traffic is once again running on our standard infrastructure (Amazon EC2). 

At approximately 6:33pm PDT, our monitoring services started to report a limited number of issues.  At 6:49pm PDT, the problems became enough to trigger our auto failover services.  Shortly thereafter, Amazon resolved their issues.  Mashery Operations tested the resolution and failed over traffic was routed back to the standard network at 7:36pm PDT. 

Should you wish further information, please contact support@mashery.com or your Client Services Manager.  We apologize for any disruption this may have caused.  

- Mashery Operations

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Attn Mashery Customers:

At approximately 6:36pm PDT, we started experiencing sporadic packet loss on our standard infrastructure (Amazon EC2).  All standard and enterprise traffic failed over to our backup alternate infrastructure.  Network DNS entries have 2 minute TTL’s, so some traffic would have experienced timeouts during those minutes.  At this point, traffic is routing well on our alternate infrastructure. 

Premium network customers were not affected.

We will update with more information shortly.

- Mashery Operations

Mashery Standard Network Clients,

Please be advised we will be doing limited maintenance on Monday, May 4th 2009 between the hours of 5:00-5:30 pm PDT.  We will be replacing a degraded memcache instance on our Standard Network deployed at Amazon EC2.  We do not expect any interruption of API traffic or degradation of service. 

Please note Premium Network clients are not impacted.

If you would like to follow us on Twitter as we make these changes, you can follow @MasheryOps for the updates as they occur. 

As always, you may contact us at support@mashery.com or contact your Client Services Manager.

Thanks!

UPDATE: ISSUE RESOLVED AS OF 2:00pm PDT

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Mashery Clients,

Please be advised the we are having problems with our reporting feature.  All Dashboard->Reports pages are non responsive due to a hardware issue.  We believe we are close to resolution and are currently projecting availability by 1pm PDT.

For more up to date information, you may follow the operations team on Twitter with @MasheryOps.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Best Regards,
Mashery Support

Mashery Clients,

Please be advised that we will have a partial service outage for maintenance purposes this Sunday from 9:00am-10:00am Pacific Daylight Time (PDT).  During this period, the following services will be unavailable:

1. Client Developer Portals
2. Mashery API

Please note, the Mashery API Proxy Service will continue to operate normally and no developer calls to your API will be impacted.  Please contact support@mashery.com with any questions.  During the maintenance window, you may follow our progress with @MasheryOps on Twitter.

Thank you.