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The Republican Party has an API
- mattdennewitz 18y agoone can simply POST into mordor. huh!
- mattdennewitz 18y agojeez. i thought it was funny. im sorry for offending so many sensibilities :/
- davidw 18y agoIt wasn't funny, but once upon a time this site had a tradition of not voting down silly/stupid stuff quite so much:-/
- mrinterweb 18y 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 18y agoMan people cannot take a joke.
- sabat 18y agorich->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 18y agoI'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.
- sabat 18y agoYeah, telling it like it is -- that's just lame.
- newt0311 18y agoNice move.
- yummyfajitas 18y agoDid someone say republicans? I hate republicans so much, and this post looks like a perfect place to complain about them.
- tjr 18y agoIt's not.
- GavinB 18y agoMaybe HN needs an API to help detect sarcasm . . .
- yummyfajitas 18y agoThanks 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.
- astine 18y agoI think we all detected your sarcasm, but who in particular are you responding too? I haven't seen any diatribes yet, and I think that it would be best that any reactions or responses to them should be actual replies. Just my two cents.
- endtime 18y agoI think we all detected your sarcasm, but who in particular are you responding too? Scroll down? There are several people who made politically motivated comments. That said, perhaps the fact that they were all downvoted into oblivion is response enough.
- mileszs 18y agoI think the point of the negative votes was to try to get the point across that sarcasm, snarkiness, whatever, adds nothing to the conversation. A better tactic would be to add a negative vote, or simply post something thoughtful that adds to the conversation that began with the posted link, or both, or nothing at all. In my opinion, those are all more worthwhile options than adding to the meaningless comments.
- mileszs 18y agoInstead 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 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.
- andreyf 18y agoI don't see how this is useful as long as it's politicized to GOP-members only...
- jacoblyles 18y agoYou 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.
- thwarted 18y agoYou can keep tabs on what half the government claims they are doing. Without another, independent source, preferably also with an API, verification will be hard to do.
- wheels 18y agoYou obviously didn't look at the API. It's just factual information (comittees, voting history, etc.) about Republican congress members. Failing technical errors, that will be accurate. I'm anything but a Republican, but I hate when there's a seriously cool effort made by the Republicans that everyone here immediately jumps into a negative tone and tries to find things wrong with it. That's even pettier than the stuff about trying to read policy into a robots.txt file. I'd love to see the parties battling each other out on information openness.
- iigs 18y agocommittee.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 18y agoI hereby propose api.gov, where your fancy little JSON structures lets you decide what you think is relevant.
- wheels 18y agoThis 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 18y agoInteresting to see them using ASP.NET MVC.
- mattdennewitz 18y agowhy?
- sethg 18y agoProps 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. :-)
- jacoblyles 18y agoOut 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.
- newt0311 18y agoregardless of the process, the implication seems to be the same.
- halo 18y agoSeems 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.
- cabalamat 18y agoI 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 http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/whenToUseGet.html
- eli 18y agoI like RESTful APIs too, but it's silly to imply that anything else is wrong
- compay 18y agoI'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.
- cabalamat 18y agoThat's right: I wasn't implying it's wrong to use POST, merely that GET is clearer, since using it would make it more obvious that the query isn't changing the state of the server.
- eli 18y agoHas anyone really looked into it? Does it provide anything that, say, opencongress.org/govtrack.us doesn't already have?
- wizard_2 18y agogovtrack 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 18y agoIs there a DELETE function?
- gislebertus 18y agoWho cares. Wish GOP sock-puppets would stop posting this stuff on HN.