API + WSDL = Cool Video Environment.

One of the cool new features of the Fliqz system is the API or Application Programming Interface, which enables web programmers to plug services offered by Fliqz into their own websites without having to jump though tons of hoops or reinvent the wheel. Using WSDL, Web Services Description Language, an XML structured language which lets web developers figure out what services are offered by Fliqz. Since it’s in XML, programmers can use any number of programming languages to manipulate the data. Fliqz offers an examples in Java and Visual Studio .NET. What you see on video.designworldonline.com was done using the PHP scripting language.

Fliqz has two different services, the Video Web Service & the Search Web Service, each providing several different functions. The functionality found in these services aren’t things that the user can do with typical embed tags offered by other video services. Sure you can put a video on your page but then you’ll have to create some HTML around it and write up a description & title and so on. Fliqz captures title & description at the time when the video is uploaded. Though a few web calls to the video web service one get title/description/other without having to rewrite everything on a static page.

The video web service is designed for individual videos and the programmer can pull metadata out of Fliqz about individual videos. Aside from title & description, other items you can query include: video rating on a scale of 1 – 5, the total number of times the video has been played, any content flags that the video may have garnered, the “permalink”, and also a thumbnail image.

The Search Web Service offers a variety of services for searching though your library of videos. Say you wanted to sort all videos by their number of plays and only show videos with a rating of 3 or better. This task is very easy with this service. You can also pull up a list of videos in order from newest to oldest (as seen on https://video.designworldonline.com) Since all the data is returned to you in XML you can do anything you want with the data further extending the capabilities of the Fliqz system. On video.designworldonline.com I’m automatically requesting a list of videos every 2 hours and checking to see whats new, whats been removed, and what their current ratings & total number of players are. In other words I’m grabbing all the meta data I can. From there I grab all the new thumb nails & reduce them even smaller to fit our format, and finally I save it to a database on the web server. I do this last part so the web site doesn’t have to call Fliqz every time a user wants to view video.designworldonline.com.