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CloudRail 3.0 — Connect to APIs 10x Faster
Made for developers: Connect to APIs 10x faster & never worry about API changes again. New: Universal Messaging API: A single interface for Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Line & Viber.
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Hi Product Hunt,
I’m Felix, co-founder of CloudRail. We’re super excited to be on PH today (thanks @kwdinc for hunting us) to share some amazing updates with the community.
CloudRail in a nutshell: We want to make API integrations easier for developers. Have you ever integrated an external service like Dropbox or Facebook into your app? Then you know the pain we are talking about: Poor docs, all APIs are different and API changes are a nightmare. With CloudRail we provide clean docs, unified APIs (integrate e.g. Dropbox via the same API as Google Drive) and we do the hard work of handling API changes for you. Universal APIs are available for a lot of categories like Cloud Storage, Social, Payment and much more.
Today we’re especially excited to show you our latest universal interface: The Unified Messaging API. It lets you programmatically connect to Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Viber and Line (with more coming soon) via a single interface. This is especially designed to create cross-platform chatbots or customer support / marketing systems. We’re really looking forward to hear your thoughts on this.
FAQ: None of your data ever touches a CloudRail server. All magic happens in the CloudRail SDK sitting in your application. The SDK then for example talks directly to Dropbox. So no SPOF, data privacy or performance issues.
Any feedback (good or bad) is much appreciated!
@felixkm This looks great. Any plans to do other API categories (e.g. Health & Fitness, Business Analytics, etc)?
@imakestrides Thanks! Yes, we are continuously adding new categories and any suggestions here are very welcome.
@felixkm Nice! It'd be awesome to see integrations with some popular health APIs (e.g. Fitbit, Myfitnesspal, MapMyFitness, HealthKit would be amazing...something like Granola), business services like Google Analytics and others, and even some task/project management tools like Basecamp, Asana, Trello, etc.
@imakestrides Sounds like a good suggestion. It's on my list now and I'll bring it up in our next meeting. If you shoot me a quick email to felix@cloudrail.com, I'll let you know once we start building it.
Used it for a pet project to play around - and it worked perfectly! This is a much better alternative to Kloudless, Cloud Elements and other services which proxy all the data through their servers!
Pros:Total control over tokens, whitelabel, no lock-in, simple setup
Cons:Documentation is a bit minimalistic
I've been following CloudRail for some time now, congrats on launching on PH! You guys have come a long way with an ever growing list of integrations.
A couple of questions:
1) Are you looking into supporting more APIs of the Microsoft suite, like Sharepoint and Outlook?
2) What does the pricing per App mean? E.g. per product, separate for web app, mobile?
3) How do you deal with differences in the native API capabilities? Revert to native API, partial support?
@tobias_jaeckel Thanks for your feedback and the good questions.
1) Are you looking into supporting more APIs of the Microsoft suite, like Sharepoint and Outlook?
We currently start to work more closely with Microsoft. Support for the Xamarin platform is one example. Sharepoint and Outlook or even the full Office 365 are pretty hight on our priority list. Do you have any specific use case in mind? These APIs are pretty powerful, so any guidance would help here. (You can also shoot me a mail to felix@cloudrail.com)
2) What does the pricing per App mean? E.g. per product, separate for web app, mobile?
It is per project. So for example Microsoft Office would count as one "app", even though it is available on iOS, Android, web etc. It's a good point, we'll make that more clear on the website.
3) How do you deal with differences in the native API capabilities? Revert to native API, partial support?
We have three levels of abstraction / ease of use:
1. Unified APIs (e.g. Unified Cloud Storage): This is an abstraction across all APIs in that category and thus usually the lowest common denominator. Super easy to use.
2. Single Integrations (e.g. Dropbox): This contains all functions of the Unified Interface plus some provider specific features. Still easy but a bit more work.
3. Advanced Request: All features / function which are not part of the above levels can be manually added by the developer. It is basically telling the SDK the URL and parameters of the respective API request. CloudRail still takes care of authentication and error handling. Not so easy anymore, but still betten than normal integrations.
I hope this helps. Let me know if you have further questions.
CloudRail