Eating our own dog food

by Diana Clarke in on November 11, 2009

About a year ago, we started to really focus on what the future of development at FreshBooks would look like.

Aside from the obvious concerns about code quality and maintainability, we had an additional requirement to keep in mind: integrations! We integrate with tons and tons of other applications, so while FreshBooks the web application is still our flagship, we needed to stop developing from its point of view, and embrace that fact that our web application is just one of many FreshBooks data consumers. We needed to start eating our own dog food.

The mantra is simple -- anything we develop for FreshBooks the web application should also be, by definition, available for third parties to consume. To accomplish this, we are in the process of decoupling our web application from the database/business logic, and instead consuming a new FreshBooks API called Evolve¹. Since our own application is driving the requirements, the resulting API is more complete and performant than previous passes. I look forward to the day when I can announce Evolve's public debut, but for now it's strictly internal.

Stay tuned for more technical details and a series of posts on how we got here. In the mean time, I'll close with a quick example of FreshBooks eating its own dog food to render a capacity meter by calling out to Evolve for the data it needs. The new API is a RESTful one that supports serialization in both XML and JSON. It's written in python and uses the SQLAlchemy ORM -- there's a bunch we could discuss there.

The capacity meter on the documents tab.


$ curl -u [auth] https://[evolve]/documents/capacities.json

{
  "response": {
    "result": {
      "capacity": {
        "available": 0.34,
        "size": 2.0,
        "unit": "MB",
        "used": 1.66
      }
    }
  }
}

$ curl -u [auth] https://[evolve]/documents/capacities.xml

<response>
  <result>
    <capacity>
      <unit>MB</unit>
      <size>2.0</size>
      <available>0.34</available>
      <used>1.66</used>
    </capacity>
  </result>
</response>

Evolve went into production a couple of weeks ago, quietly ripping the backend out of our web application, one data silo at a time. I'm proud. What do you think? Feedback? Questions?

¹Nope, not implying that we were Neanderthals before -- I name all my apps after Ani Difranco.

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API Updates: Project Staff, Custom Emails and payment.delete

by Paul in API Additions, Development on October 23, 2009

On Wednesday we released some pretty exciting updates to our API and wanted to make sure you were aware of them.

Project Results

If you are an administrator or a staff member who is assigned as a project manager to a project, project.get and project.list methods now return the ids of users who are assigned to that project. Up until now it was impossible to determine if a user was assigned to a project when listing them. Because of this, our OS X time tracker for instance would list all projects that a user could see, not just the ones that they were assigned to. If the user clicked on "Submit" after selecting a project that they weren't assigned to, they would get an error because you can't track time to a project you aren't assigned to. What a headache! See the updated documentation for details.

Custom Emails

You can now send custom email messages with invoice.sendByEmail and estimate.sendByEmail. Just include both a subject and a message element in your request. You can use any of the variables that are available when customizing messages within FreshBooks (i.e. ::invoice link::, ::payment amount::, ::estimate link::). See examples on the invoice and estimate documentation pages.

Delete Payments

We've added a payment.delete method. This will allow you to permanently delete payments. If the payment being deleted was made against an invoice, the status of the invoice will be updated. Check out the documentation.

So there you go, three great new features!

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Staff API Access: No More Restrictions!

by Paul in API Additions, Integrations, Development on September 30, 2009

As of today, the FreshBooks API is fully functional for Staff members, not just Administrators. Ever since its debut, the API has used a more restrictive set of permissions than the application. This made things a little simpler for us, but it didn't help our users or third-party add-on developers. It meant that certain third-party applications simply weren't as useful for customers who had multiple staff members sharing a single FreshBooks account. We've received many requests from developers to open up permissions in the API so that they more closely follow the permission settings in the application. You have been heard!

Staff now have access to all of the API methods as long as they are given the appropriate permissions from the application settings. This means that if the invoices tab is enabled for staff in the application, they can view and edit invoices from the API for clients who they are assigned to. Likewise, if the estimates tab is enabled, they will have API access to estimates for clients who they are assigned to. Ditto for Recurring Profiles, Payments and Items.

We hope that this change will make existing applications more useful and encourage new kinds of third-party add-ons that were simply not possible before. Having the API be more consistent with the application should help make FreshBooks more useful for everybody.

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