XING Devblog

App Builder Spotlight: Marvin

Posted by Magith Noohukhan Filed under API

robotRock_pt_03

Passionate about developing apps?
Want to be recognized among the XING community?
Want your app to reach millions of people?
Want to be famous?

If you answered yes to at least one of these questions, you’ve definitely come to the right place! We came up with a new idea where developers now have a chance to introduce themselves and their app in this blog. To get the ball rolling, we decided to ask Marvin some questions about his experience and from now on Marvin will use his awesome-app-detecting spotlight to find the super developer. Here are his answers for the questions we asked.

→ Read more…

Posted by Christian Angermann

Filed under API

Life cycle of XING API calls

This is the first in a series of blog posts on specific aspects of the XING API. To kick things off we will cover the lifecycle of API calls. All XING API calls have one of the following states:

Experimental

Experimental calls are fully specified, implemented, tested and can be accessed by any test consumer. We specifically have this status in our API so that developers who experiment with these calls can provide us with valuable feedback, which in turn allows us to figure out what needs to be improved.

Our goal is to bring these experimental calls to production within three months or less. We may apply breaking changes to these calls during the experimental phase, meaning that production consumers will not be able to access experimental calls. → Read more…

Posted by Tobias Krogh

Filed under Frontend Mobile User Experience

Placeholder – revived using state-of-the-art technology

At the beginning of July 2012 I wrote an article about a custom [placeholder] solution we integrated at XING. The idea was to have placeholders that should still be visible when focused (see “placeholder – Custom solution vs. native HTML5 feature”).

As mentioned in that article, Chrome at one point natively handled what we implemented in a heavily jQuery based way. Having that said, it means they went against the specification, which may seem weird, but no one ever said that a specification is set in stone. (I’ll refer to that again later.)

→ Read more…

Posted by Christian Hansel

Filed under API

Revamped XING Share Button now part of Developer Portal

Over a year ago, a couple of dedicated engineers got together and used their innovation time to produce a new and cool way to boost interaction with XING. In the meantime, a new team was formed to take over the innovation project and has continued to improve the performance of this JavaScript-based plugin.

The XING Share Button allows website owners to let their visitors spread content on the XING platform and bring even more visitors and engagement to their website. How? By clicking on the button, a popup appears which guides visitors through the sharing dialog. This means your website visitors stay on your site – even when spreading your content to XING.
→ Read more…

Posted by Mark Schmidt

Filed under API

devblog unchained

From now on we’ll continue our look at the various programming languages and provide you with tips, tricks and hacks while also reporting on the latest updates to our API, interesting and trending Developer Group topics, planned XING developer events, and brand new apps. We highly recommend you subscribe to our RSS feed so you always get the latest news hot off the press.

→ Read more…

Posted by Julian Knocke

Filed under Stuff

Open-sourced WWW::Curl::UserAgent

Ensuring that resources are provided quickly, reliably and in a fault-tolerant manner for serving each web request is one of the challenges when running XING. A lot of these resources are served via an HTTP-based API, so each web request to our platform might trigger a set of internal HTTP requests. If one part of the platform experiences problems, the increase in response times to these internal requests should not result in a knock-on effect, e.g. caused by overflowing queues of processes waiting for responses. Therefore it is important to both minimize I/O on and avoid long running requests.
→ Read more…