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Flipping Through the Phone.com API Library

October 18, 2018
By Paula Bernier, Executive Editor, TMC

Developing new solutions, and integrating existing ones, can be a real challenge. To help make the process easier, Phone.com (News - Alert) offers an API library.


This online resource hub provides comprehensive guides and documentation to expedite development efforts and launch new capabilities more quickly. That way application providers and users can enjoy new productivity, revenue, and savings benefits from those applications earlier rather than later.

Phone.com’s Phoenix API is one of the things visitors will find at the company’s API developer portal. The company launched this REST API in 2016 for ease of integration.

“Part of a being a REST API is including links and other metadata in our response bodies,” Phone.com explains. “This means our API is partially self-documenting. By default, our response bodies include whitespace to make them more human-readable. We also feature judicious use of metadata and context-sensitive links to inform you about related resources.”

Those resources are formatted using the Mason, draft 2 specification. A JSON-based REST media type, Mason is like an enhanced version of HAL.

Mason has the following main properties: @controls, @namespaces (a shorthand for locating documentation for custom link relations), @meta (which appears only in the root level of a Mason document), and @error. “The @controls property is by far the most important one,” Phone.com explains. “It has a list of any links and/or forms that are related to the object you are looking at. @controls can appear at any level in the response body.”

Of course, Phoenix is just one of the resources in the Phone.com API library. Library visitors will also find account event listeners and tools to create account events, account extension caller IDs, account extensions, account extension contact groups, account menus, account payment methods, account routes, and account voicemail, and much more. To see the full array of Phone.com API offerings, visit https://apidocs.phone.com/




Edited by Maurice Nagle

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