News

When I first heard about SoftLayer, the first thing that popped into my head was “just another web hosting company”. Boy was I wrong! Little did I know I would be diving head first into a world that would open my mind and push me to challenge myself on the very first day.

I’ve only been with SoftLayer for three weeks, but in this short period of time I’ve been exposed to more innovative strategies, open-ended techniques and an overall strive to better ourselves than I’ve seen in a lifetime. It’s obvious that innovation is more than just a philosophy but key to our success.

SoftLayer Object Storage is based on OpenStack Swift and provides integrated indexing, searching and CDN support. Information stored to SoftLayer Object Storage is written multiple times to self-healing clusters which have the ability to immediately restore data in case of drive failure.
Unlike previously released APIs SoftLayer Object Storage is only available on a REST interface. However, very much like our other APIs will you have the ability to fully interact with SoftLayer Object Storage programmatically.

The SoftLayer Development Network site will be unavailable between 5:00am and 6:00am CST on 12/14/2011. This maintenance window will be used to upgrade the infrastructure hosting the site. Please contact sldn@softlayer.com if you have any questions or concerns.

The SoftLayer Developer Network thrives on your feedback! Let us know what features and improvements you would like to see in the future. You can reach the SLDN team at sldn@softlayer.com.

Change Log:
*A number of GUI tweaks which should make the site a bit more kind on the eyes.
*The blog section has been removed and now all blogs and news articles will appear on the home page.
*A tag cloud has been added to provide filtering for blog/news articles.

Good news everyone!

The past few months we have been working feverously on redesigning the SoftLayer Development Network site.

The goals for this first release are as follows:
* Maintain level of functionality and features of the previous SLDN
* Unify browsing experience by collapsing the blog and reference documentation into a single content management system
* Lay the groundwork for advanced features such as rating, comments, user generated content, and even a real time feed of API changes

As the depletion of IPv4 space draws nearer we have added a new requirement when placing an order which contains addtional IP addresses. In addition to the usual suspects you will need to add an additional array to your order container object: itemCategoryQuestionAnswers.

When I first learned about object oriented programming, many years ago, I found that the technique fit me well. I found the process of breaking a computing problem down into objects to be a natural way to analyze many of them. At the same time, my designs are never as elegant as I would like them to be in the first draft. For me, the object oriented design process involves tinkering with the design, trying a couple of iterations, and refining the deconstruction over time. I prefer to work with prototypes and explore their interaction before settling on a final implementation.

In our last post we mentioned that our API now supports a REST interface. It's really true, and it's really here! Quoth our new, fancy, manual page:

REST API URLs are structured to easily traverse SoftLayer's object hierarchy. A basic REST request is structured as follows:

Some of you have noticed that we mentioned our new mobile clients are based on our developer API but don't require a VPN connection to our private network. Your observations are astute and indeed correct.

Lately I've seen a lot of people around me writing and hacking in Python. Way back when API v1 was out we noted that Python has built-in XML-RPC support. Built-in XML-RPC support is great. It makes calling our API, especially our latest API, a snap. Some of y'all on our forums have been doing very cool things with our API in Python. Python hackers and users, we've just made your lives easier.