WhenHub Developer Platform
Note: This is a repost from the WhenHub blog
WhenHub Studio makes it easy for users to create schedules and publish them to the web as interactive visualizations. These visualizations, called Whencasts, deliver a great user experience on desktop and mobile, while providing deep integration with standard calendar clients such as Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook and Apple Calendar. The glue that makes this seamless flow of information from schedule-to-Whencast-to-calendar possible is the WhenHub Developer Platform which consists of an API and a visualization framework.
We created the WhenHub Developer Platform because we believe the world needs a modern, feature-rich date/time API and a framework for visualizing chronological information that isn’t limited to calendar grids or simple lists. The WhenHub Developer Platform provides:
- A REST API for managing schedules with collections of events, with full support for media, locations, custom fields, time zones, recurring events and web hooks.
- A framework for designing visualizations that transform schedules into interactive, embeddable content for web and mobile (“Whencast”).
If you are a developer with a date/time-centric app, you are most likely using or have used the Google Calendar API. Here are a few ways in which the Google API falls short:
- No support for photos and videos
- No ability to get a calendar and events in a single request
- Locations do not contain any detail or geo-coordinates
- Only Google file attachments are supported
- You need to know time zones and offsets
- Detail fields are text only without any markup support
- Webhooks are difficult to setup and use
- iCal feeds have an indeterminant refresh interval
Switching to the WhenHub Developer Platform will give you significantly more benefits, while maintaining access to events from Google and other calendars. In addition to storing and processing events, our platform also gives you the ability to use existing visualizations or create your own visualization for chronological information putting an end to boring grid-only ways to present date/time information.
Our Developer Platform has a ton of information which might be over-whelming as you get started. Here’s a handy if…then list based on your objective which should make things easier:
- If you have never used WhenHub Studio, then you might find Developer Platform concepts to be abstract and hard to follow. I highly recommend you login to WhenHub Studio and use the UI to create a schedule and publish a Whencast to the web. Once you have done this, API constructs will be much easier for you to understand.
- If you want to see the type of built-in visualizations so you can get inspiration for designing your own, then the Whencast Explorer will be enlightening.
- If you don’t like to read and just want examples to play with, then our GitHub Samples repository is the best place to get started.
- If you want an overview of the WhenHub API with step-by-step instructions, then the API Getting Started section is right for you.
- If you want to review the API end-points available, then the API Reference is the place to get started.
- If you want an overview of visualizations with step-by-step instructions for creating your own, then the Visualization Getting Started section is an ideal starting point.
- If none of these is a good fit, then the WhenHub Developer Platform home page is a good place to start your journey.
Our engineering team is excited to share our work with other developers and to see what cool things you will do with the API and visualization framework. Both are free to use and have reasonable internal limits that you are unlikely to exceed (but if you do, let us know and we can adjust them for you).
Happy coding!
