One of the nice side effects to installing the latest ColdFusion security hotfix is that ColdFusion 8 and ColdFusion 9 now both include the jar files for the OWASP ESAPI or Enterprise Security API.

I was doing some consulting work for a client using the Salesforce.com API with ColdFusion I was getting the following error:

INVALID_FIELD: SELECT HasOptedOutOfEmail, Email, FirstName ^ ERROR at Row:1:Column:8 No such column 'HasOptedOutOfEmail' on entity 'Contact'.

I just noticed PostalMethods a new SOAP web service / API for sending snail mail via the US Postal Service. This service is from the folks at InterFax who have a nice web service for sending Faxes as well.

Joshua Bloch has a good presentation outline called How to Design a Good API and Why it Matters. Joshua is a Principal Software Engineer for Google, before that an architect in Sun's Core Java Platform Group (he designed several of the standard java API's). Josh also wrote Effective Java.

I am seeing a lot of new web services are implemented using a REST style architecture these days rather than a SOAP one. Lets step back a second and explain what REST is.

FeedBurner is introducing their Feed Awareness API. If you have a free account with FeedBurner you can get your feed circulation (number of subscribers), and number of hits on your feed using their REST api.

If you have a pro account you can get item, and resyndication data from the API.

Textamerica has released their new developer api for mobloggers. They are also giving a $500 prize to the first 20 applications (with source code) which we deem to be the most useful to the Textamerica Community as a whole.

The first example app is a Textamerica4j by David Czarneck.

I am now a contributer to the API Blog.

My most recent post is about the 43 Things Web Service that was just released.

If you haven't checked out 43 Things it's a pretty cool web site where you can share info about common goals you have.

Google has launched a new site called Google Code it is Google's place for Open Source software.

Right now all the projects listed are mostly C/C++, with one Python project.

You may have noticed in the last few weeks I have had something at the bottom of my posts called Related Books Beta. Let me explain how I did that.

I play around a lot with Amazon web services (have you seen my site to find amazon deals?).