Twitip

On Wednesday at Chirp, Twitter’s developer conference, Apigee launched new developer tools for the Twitter API.

Developers and beginners can use the Apigee console to learn, experiment, test, or explore the Twitter API.

As you can see, each API method is listed down the left hand side. You can use these methods to explore different aspects and functions of the Twitter API. Choose the method you want to use, customize any parameter values, such as screen_name and ID, and hit the Test button. The Apigee console will then issue an API call and you’ll then see a cleanly-formatted response as well as the original request and response headers for the call. What does this mean for the developer? Well, it gives them unprecedented ease of use.

For API methods that require authentication, you can use HTTP basic authentication (a straight username and password). Better still, you can even sign in to Twitter and use that same authentication to sign API calls using OAuth (the system under “sign in with Twitter”). This is incredibly helpful for developers using the Twitter API because no other free tools support OAuth for Twitter methods.

But, possibly the best feature of all is the Snapshot. With Snapshot, any request and response you make with the API Console can be cached and shared with anyone else without your credentials. This is really helpful because it means that when you are trying to get help from someone else for a particular API response, you can just share your Snapshot of the call with them. Fabulous!

Start playing (for free) with the Apigee Console for Twitter!