Congrats to all the folks at Delphic Sage for once again being recognized by the Philadelphia Business Journal as one the Philadelphia region's top web integrators.

As a full service interactive agency, we frequently work with clients to enable different systems and applications to talk to each other in support of interactive and digital marketing activities. This makes the user experience that much more engaging, but also enables our clients to harness information to make smarter business decisions.

So, a big shout out to our clients too for making this job fun by doing strange and difficult stuff that we love so much.

Today at Delphic Sage was our brown bag lunch, where food is ordered early and everyone sits in for a presentation. My presentation today went well, no one fell asleep, and there was good group participation. We discussed Application Programming Interface or APIs in much more depth than this slideshow will portray, including brainstorming, observations, and solving the example problems using APIs.

I think the best real world example of an API is the gas pedal in your car. You press it and move forward, and you don't need to know anything about internal combustion to drive a car. APIs are in use everywhere, and in this day and age, if you are a website, and you provide a service, the API (or lack thereof) could ultimately be the deciding factor between success and failure. Enjoy the slideshow.

(Or insert your favorite Regular Expression enabled text editor here).
This is part one of a multi-part series of tools that we use to get the job done, whatever that job may be.
Oftentimes our work is not always "here's a spec, create it", but at other times that work is "here's an export of our database for you to work with". In an ideal world, we would like to receive this in something that is easily imported into a relational database., but more often than not we just get a straight "dump" (usually multiple CSV files) of the production data. The major challenge that we often face in this scenario is of how to maintain the original data integrity, and how we do it without blowing our budget. That's where using the regex replace functionality that is part of EditPlus comes in very handy.

Here's a sample of what the data dump might look like:

Where ID (the first column) might be the Primary key of the item on their system, and foreign keys always refer to different IDs than what's on your local system. At first this was impossible to do while keeping the data accurate, so I had to ask for the data that the foreign keys referenced. So now we're all set.  Read on for the solution