We’re pleased to announce the most newsworthy update to the Freebase app development platform, Acre, since its launch late last year.
The first and most important feature is the ability to write to Freebase, enabled by OAuth and the API keystore. We talked about this at our Hack Day back in November, and we’ve had a kind of rudimentary write support for those who wanted to experiment, but now you’re fully able to write apps that write Freebase data on behalf of any logged-in user, like data entry tools, games, and more.
What’s particularly interesting about OAuth and the keystore is that you can use them to connect to other providers, such as Yahoo and Google, that provide OAuth authentication. You can even write to those services using OAuth. And the API keystore can be used to store arbitrary API keys, not just OAuth secrets, so you can use it to connect to sites like Flickr, Facebook, or Amazon.
Further reading: More detail on writing to Freebase with Acre, Freebase OAuth support, and the Keystore.
New Acre APIs
In addition to new APIs for the keystore and OAuth, there is also console.log which allows for full object dumping, and new APIs for using Freebase services (including search and user_info, which did not previously have helper APIs).
Further reading: Acre API reference
App Editor improvements
App Editor has had a ground-up rewrite that is significantly faster, has a new design, and has a couple of nice new features thrown in for good measure:
- New preview window with a Firebug-style object browser for things logged with console.log
- A new ‘App’ menu for moving, deleting and changing the authors of an app (none of which was there before).
Further reading: See all bugfixes and improvements in this release.
Find out more at our user group meeting
We’re having our semi-regular San Francisco user group meeting next Tuesday, Jan 27th, and members of the Acre team will be demonstrating the new features and taking Q&A. Please attend! RSVP via upcoming.org.
