We live in the era of apps. We have apps everywhere. Easy to use and performing very specific tasks, apps are the way to go. And with VoipNow 3, we introduce the support for apps.

The History

Any API is designed to be used by third party applications. So were VoipNow’s APIs. Technically, the old SystemAPI was very useful for applications that “talked” management operations with VoipNow. The authentication was made with user credentials, therefore an application had to know the credentials of a particular user. This was not very good. Additionally, it had access to absolutely all resources of the user – another problem.

CallAPI was introduced as a modern API, REST based, with OAuth 1.1 authentication and authorization. It controlled only calls, but it was nicer – it was possible to create a set of credentials for each application you wished to access VoipNow using CallAPI interface. While this was far better, the management was still complicated – it was necessary to go to the VoipNow web interface to add credentials for the Apps that accessed CallAPI. While these credentials were used by Apps, we cannot call it App friendly…

What About VoipNow 3?

With VoipNow 3 we introduce a new API – UnifiedAPI. Read more about it and what happened with the other APIs.

This API was designed with Apps in mind, therefore the access is extremely App oriented:

• Apps can self-register to VoipNow. This means that the user does not have to use the VoipNow interface to register the App, add credentials etc. The App calls VoipNow and the user must only permit the App to access his resources on VoipNow (process is very similar to the Facebook Apps).
• Apps can be managed by the user in the web management interface. Do you want to de-authorize an App? No problem.
• Not only web Apps are supported, but even mobile phone Apps can use the UnifiedAPI.
• We have built-in support for authorizing access only to some resources.

Apps authentication and authorization is using the next generation OAuth 2.0, which although has not been standardized yet, it is used by Facebook, LinkedIn, Google. Even SystemAPI, an old API that will be phased out in the future, supports Apps. Therefore, you can make your legacy integrations at least more secure and controllable.

The new App process is much more friendly for developers. Any App you might write can be registered to any VoipNow installation on the planet.

The user does not have to do much… There are many opportunities ahead.

You can find out more about UnifiedAPI, authentication and authorization on our Wiki. In case you haven’t noticed, we published the documentation for developers ten days ago.

Stay tuned for the next article about cloud storage and how you can use Amazon S3 with VoipNow 3.