FriendFeed PyAPI, or "What I did over winter break"

In mid-December 2008 I made the decision to go dark and execute on a solid coding project I could sink my teeth into. On January 13, 2009, I emerged with the fruits of a lot of labor of the fingertips: a fully fledged Python interface library to the FriendFeed API, suitably named FriendFeed PyAPI.

This library began from the original Python code available from the FriendFeed Google Code repository. This library provided a great basis, as it showed me how to implement method calls to the FriendFeed API, as well as contained code necessary for authentication which I wouldn't possibly have known how to write. The original library returned native Python structures of dictionaries, lists, strings, integers, and the like, parsed out using one of several available JSON parsing libraries which may be available on the systems. While this worked well enough, I saw a chance to really improve the library by having it work with and return full fledged data structures to represent the various FriendFeed entities, including users, rooms, entries, comments, and media. Calvin Spealman, a.k.a. ironfroggy, asked me two shrewd questions: 1) Wasn't I just creating an ORM [object-relational mapping]? 2) Why would I do that? The answer to 1) was "Yes". My answer to 2) was, essentially, "Because I want to." Calvin understood what I now know about undertaking the process: it takes a lot of time doing grunt work coding to create an ORM. I had experience using the object-oriented Python interface to the Twitter API for another project for Bertalan Meskó, and I really enjoyed the "feel" of that library, and so I made it my goal to bring the same kind of feel to the FriendFeed library. The result was an expansion and refactoring of the original library of 812 lines of code to nearly 4,000 lines, 45 unit tests, 8 entity classes, about a dozen exceptions, and support for nearly all the API calls available.

I think the real joy for me came from creating methods to parse the JSON structures recursively and instantiate appropriate objects at each depth. These objects are then appropriately set as attributes of their parent objects (that is, the objects they "belong to"). All of this is done quite simply with a mapping scheme of entity names to methods (e.g. mapping the key 'users' to the method _parse_users), and it feels quite elegant having it all work together, calling the appropriate parsing method for each structure, and returning beautiful little self-documented class instances. Witnessing it work in concert for the first time was definitely a "blinking LED moment," as my friend Ian Firkin would say.

Perhaps the most important lesson came not from the specific technical hurdles I made my way through, but from the personal insight that I absolutely love programming. I love writing code; I love to talk about writing code; and I really love interacting with other developers. Over the course of the couple of weeks, I consulted Stack Overflow, hit up #python on IRC, and had direct email exchanges with Ben Golub at FriendFeed (who, by the way, is an absolutely stand-up developer and a fantastic representative for the young service). I have a genuine sense of satisfaction from the code and documentation I produced for the project, and that feeling makes for a happier life more than any other currency (except, possibly, beer).

So what now? Well, I released FriendFeed PyAPI under the same Apache License (Version 2) that FriendFeed released the original library under. This means you may fork it, play with it, and modify it to your heart's content, and if you care to, let me know what improvements you've made so I can merge them back into the trunk branch. (Of course, you may also keep any and all modifications to yourself, in your quest for world domination, though you'll still have to attribute FriendFeed and me as taking a part in your doomsday device.) [Edit: On second thought, please don't attribute me in those events.] I also have a list of future directions, and a few ideas of my own, including the one that actually spurned this spurt of code-writing, that I look forward to releasing upon FriendFeeders. So go out and use it! Ask questions about it! Most importantly, please report bugs!