The Republican Party has an API

http://www.gop.gov/api

by yef • 17 years ago

52 50 17 years ago

gop.gov

mattdennewitz3• 17 years ago

one can simply POST into mordor. huh!

mattdennewitz3• 17 years ago

jeez. i thought it was funny. im sorry for offending so many sensibilities :/

davidw• 17 years ago

It wasn't funny, but once upon a time this site had a tradition of not voting down silly/stupid stuff quite so much:-/

mrinterweb• 17 years ago

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no" ?>
  <SOAP-ENV:Envelope
   SOAP-ENV:encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"
   xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
   xmlns:SOAP-ENC="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"
   xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/1999/XMLSchema-instance"
   xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/1999/XMLSchema">
	<SOAP-ENV:Body>
		<ns1:doubleAnInteger
		 xmlns:ns1="urn:GOPAPI">
			<param1 xsi:type="xsd:int">666</param1>
		</ns1:doubleAnInteger>
                <getTalkingPoints:string xmlns:getTalkingPoints="urn:RequestTalkingPointsTrue">Give 
                 me my talking points</getTalkingPoints>
	</SOAP-ENV:Body>
  </SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

peregrine• 17 years ago

Man people cannot take a joke.

sabat2• 17 years ago

rich->funnel_money_from_middle_class(hide=[true])

environment->screw(distort_facts=[true])

populus->dictate_christian_lifestyle()

populus->promote_fascism(not_called_fascism_when_we_do_it=[true])

jonursenbach• 17 years ago

I'm sure I speak for most of the progressives on HN when I say that we support what you're saying as being the overall GOP agenda, but man... that was just lame.

sabat2• 17 years ago

Yeah, telling it like it is -- that's just lame.

newt03112• 17 years ago

Nice move.

yummyfajitas4• 17 years ago

Did someone say republicans? I hate republicans so much, and this post looks like a perfect place to complain about them.

tjr• 17 years ago

It's not.

GavinB• 17 years ago

Maybe HN needs an API to help detect sarcasm . . .

yummyfajitas4• 17 years ago

Thanks for the tip. I was completely unaware of that when I wrote my original post.

That's why I posted a long political diatribe, rather than a short snarky emulation of people who use a post like this as an excuse to launch into long irrelevant political diatribes.

mileszs2• 17 years ago

Instead of joking about it, you might find it interesting to actually go browse the available methods, as well as some of the examples. (Link to the examples page: http://www.gop.gov/aboutapi/documentation) Take an honest look at, say, the Perl example. Then browse a few of the methods (on the right hand side) to see what they return.

Although I don't find myself agreeing with the GOP on many issues, I am able to see that this offers real value beyond fodder for programmers who wish to be comedians. If nothing else, I hope to see it driving the momentum to 'open' government.

andreyf2• 17 years ago

I don't see how this is useful as long as it's politicized to GOP-members only...

jacoblyles2• 17 years ago

You can keep tabs on what half the government is doing.

And there are honest-to-god Republican activists out there (check the comments with negative ratings on the bottom of social news sites) who want to know what their party is up to and keep it on task. Much like how others might want to know what the Obama administration or the Democratic caucus is up to.

All in all, I think it's pretty awesome. I hope the Democrats will follow suit, or that Congress will put up a general API. That would be even better.

andreyf2• 17 years ago

Um, please don't down-vote people you disagree with. This commend spawned a thread, -6 is not appropriate.

cdeutmey• 17 years ago

I like HN and the GOP. It’s good to see that there is some civility here to keep me from leaving.

jrockway• 17 years ago

> Take an honest look at, say, the Perl example.

I did. It doesn't even compile :)

(It is mostly correct, but they have a semicolon incorrectly placed between arguments to the LWP request function. I usually test my code before putting it online. Usually.)

iigs• 17 years ago

committee.members

This method provides all Republican members of standing or subcommittees.

I recognize that this is a party site, but I wonder how much additional work it would have been to capture the non-GOP members and votes. I can't think of a situation where I'd want to know just a fraction of the members of a subcommittee; I'd think if you care you'd care about everyone in it.

forthewin• 17 years ago

I hereby propose api.gov, where your fancy little JSON structures lets you decide what you think is relevant.

wheels2• 17 years ago

This might actually be more useful in the long run. To me this says that Republicans are trying to show their tech saavy and trying to capture some of the good karma that the Democrats have doned of late in their gestures towards technology and open information.

Having the parties competing on this would be wonderful. It'd be like market effects on the web-ization of government information. Were this just a single political initiative coming from whatever agency it'd be a surefire bitrot target, but if the Republicans and Democrats start trying to one-up each other for political ends, we might see things evolve in a more interesting direction.

Politics seems to be most effective when it's trying to win something. ;-)

cosmo7• 17 years ago

Interesting to see them using ASP.NET MVC.

mattdennewitz3• 17 years ago

why?

sethg• 17 years ago

Props to the Republicans for doing this; I'm a confirmed liberal Democrat but I don't mind seeing both parties pandering for the geek vote. :-)

jacoblyles2• 17 years ago

Out of curiosity, how do you become a "confirmed" liberal Democrat? Is that like becoming a confirmed Catholic? Is there a process?

And you are right that the most successful interest groups are ones that can get their policies pushed by both parties. I would love to see intelligent technology policies pushed by 2 parties, instead of about 10% of a party like we see now.

newt03112• 17 years ago

regardless of the process, the implication seems to be the same.

halo• 17 years ago

Seems like a direct response to the Obama election team and administration's use of the Internet and technology over recent months. In the short-term it's not going to win them any votes, but it's good for the GOP brand and setting up infrastructure and increasing awareness for later higher-profile campaigns in an area where the Democrats are seen to dominate them.

It's amazing how much competition stimulates progress.

cabalamat3• 17 years ago

I notice all the methods use POST. Shouldn't they use GET instead, on the ground that each access doesn't change the state of the server? http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/whenToUseGet.html

eli2• 17 years ago

I like RESTful APIs too, but it's silly to imply that anything else is wrong

compay• 17 years ago

I'm not sure the implication was necessarily that it was wrong, the poster (no pun intended) could have meant that it could simply have been better to use GET.

eli2• 17 years ago

Has anyone really looked into it? Does it provide anything that, say, opencongress.org/govtrack.us doesn't already have?

wizard_2• 17 years ago

govtrack is amazing, rsync mirrors of their full database for your own use. A wonderfully useful website, I've even got rss feeds for what my congresspeople are up to.

joubert• 17 years ago

Is there a DELETE function?

gislebertus• 17 years ago

Who cares.

Wish GOP sock-puppets would stop posting this stuff on HN.

The Republican Party has an API

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