The Blog

The what's what of the Flowdock atmosphere.

Blog Archives

Introduction to the New Streaming API

February 16th, 2012

Ville Lautanala

Today we’re introducing a new Streaming API, which we hope will ease the process of building your own Flowdock clients and bots. Streaming API allows real-time access to everything that happens inside a flow.

Using the API

Streaming API comes in two flavours: carriage-return delimited JSON stream and HTML5 Event-Stream.

If you have used the Twitter Streaming API, you should be familiar with our JSON Stream. You can try it out using curl.

$ curl -i -H "Accept: application/json" https://<token>@stream.flowdock.com/flows/<organization>/<flow>
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Florence
Cache-Control: no-cache
Content-Type: application/json
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: keep-alive


{"event":"message","tags":[],"uuid":"pWkb-CPeyFG66ns-","id":142790,"flow":"example:main","content":"hello world","sent":1329307314476,"app":"chat","attachments":[],"user":"1"}
{"event":"message","tags":[],"uuid":"uk7TFsf75WEJbWsy","id":142791,"flow":"example:main","content":"test","sent":1329307316726,"app":"chat","attachments":[],"user":"1"}
...

Event-Stream is part of HTML5 Server-Sent Events specification. In our streaming API each event contains a JSON encoded message as data. To use Event-Stream, set Accept header to text/event-stream. If this isn’t possible, you can also use accept query parameter. In addition to support in modern browsers, there are client libraries, and it isn’t hard to roll your own.

Under the hood

We built a HTTP server using CoffeeScript and NodeJS to run our Streaming API. Combined with a little Redis and authentication magic, we were ready to go.

As a new message is sent to Flowdock, we process the message and publish it to the corresponding flow’s Redis pub/sub channel. When a new client connects, our server subscribes to flow channels the client wishes to listen to. Every time a subscriber receives a new message, we will check if there are any connected clients for that flow, and if so we will dispatch the message down to existing connection in the appropriate JSON/Event-Stream format.

We’re looking forward to see what amazing applications can be built on top of the Streaming API. If you have any issues or feedback, feel free to contact us.

Leave a comment

New API: Push + REST + Streaming

February 15th, 2012

Mikael Roos

It’s hacking time! The new Flowdock API is out now. We are currently in the process of polishing up the documentation, which will be put onto a public repo on Github a little later for everyone to fine-tune. At this point we are still actively editing and expanding the docs.

Here are the new APIs as of now:

REST API — Read the docs

  • Authenticate as a Flowdock user
  • Get flow data
  • Post to chat or update status
  • Great for Flowdock clients, user-based integrations or two-way bots.

Streaming API — Read the docs

  • Listen to messages
  • Great whenever you want to render the conversation or parse things from what people say.

Push API — Read the docs

  • Post to Team Inbox or Chat without identifying as a user
  • Great for notifications or simple bots which do not need to listen to messages.

Things to come

In the Following days, we will write up the different parts of the API in greater detail. We will also post about these awesome things:

Stay tuned! And tell us what you would like to see next via team@flowdock.com.

Leave a comment