Newspapers 2.x? The New York Times REST API and the New York Times Silverlight Kit

Synergist - The New York Times Silverlight Kit

“Today we are excited to announce a new alliance with the New York Times around a new Silverlight Kit for the New York Times APIs.  The New York Times has made a number of services freely available to software developers as REST services at their Developer Network:

• Article Search
• Best Sellers
• Campaign Finance
• Community
• Congress
• Movie Reviews
• NY State Legislature
• Real Estate
• Times Newswire
• Times People
• Times Tags

Since Silverlight works very well with REST services, we wanted to make it easy for designers and developers to use these services in their applications.  To do this we are releasing with the New York Times a New York Times Silverlight Kit which includes CLR objects and Value Converter to enable designers and developers to take advantage of these services in their applications.  I first started using the New York Times APIs in my winning entry to the Circus Mashimus Contest at South by Southwest.  In building the kit we had a few goals:

• Make it easy for designers and developers to use the APIs with little to no coding: all XAML
• Include Design-Time sample data to facilitate crafting experiences in Expression Blend and Visual Studio
• Use the MVVM Design Pattern to separate components for test-ability and data binding.

To get an idea of what can be built with the kit, you can take a look at the Artist Explorer and Demo Site, but I’d like to walk through one of the kit components, the NYTimes.TimesTag CLR object and how it could be used.

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MSDN Code Gallery - New York Times Silverlight Kit

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This is a Silverlight 2 Kit for the New York Times Open APIs. Add this kit to a Silverlight 2 project in Visual Studio or Expression Blend to easily access New York Times APIs for Articles, Best Sellers (books), the US Congress, Movie Reviews, Community Comments, Times Tags, and Newswire information.

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Kit Demo, http://xmldocs.net/nyt/ (Searching on my home town)

Okay, just how cool is that!?

The NY Times seems to like living on the tech edge (remember their WPF Viewer?) and this is a continuing step in that direction. Newspapers have to re-invent themselves to survive and this is an interesting attempt at that. Free the presentation of the data and the world will be a path to your feed… ;)