OpenX Blog

The new release of OpenX includes an exciting new feature which promises to save online advertisers lots of time and money: the OpenX API. The new OpenX API gives developers a way to control the ad server so they can automate common tasks and integrate with other applications in a stable and reliable way.

Here’s a quick FAQ that introduces the new OpenX API, describes the key features and explains how it can help you integrate the OpenX ad server into your overall business.

What is the OpenX API?
The OpenX API is a web service. It provides an interface for other applications to control entities like advertisers, campaigns, banners, websites and zones on your ad server.

How can it make my life easier?
With a little TLC, the API can be used to streamline your business processes and automate some of the more mundane tasks to reduce the possibility of “pilot error”. Copying and pasting from one system into another is inherently error-prone, and use of the API could free up your staff to engage in more productive pursuits.

What kind of things can I do with it?
There are lots of different things the OpenX API can do to help make your systems interoperate better. Here are just a few examples:

• The OpenX API can be used to integrate your ad server with an existing sales tool, so that when you book a sale, the campaign details are automatically set up in your OpenX installation, without human intervention. You can also link your billing system to pull down statistics and billing information directly from the ad server on demand.
• Some publishers have begun to streamline data entry processes using the API, e.g. creating a simple banner upload web-form to automatically upload banners into their OpenX system.
• The more geeky users out there have already been experimenting with building interfaces into the OpenX API from other languages. We’ve provided helper libraries and example code in PHP and Java. Python and Ruby clients are already in development by community members.

Does the OpenX API give me complete control of the ad server?
We’ve chosen the most important attributes for this first release, which provides the basic functionality required by most publishers. We expect to expand the functionality in upcoming releases.

That’s all very cool, where can I get more detailed (technical) information?
We’ve written a step-by-step OpenX API tutorial with worked examples for using the API from both a PHP and a Java client which takes you through the basics of connecting to and sending commands to the OpenX API.

We also have auto-generated OpenX API interface specification. This is an intimidating document, but it does accurately describe all the classes, variables and methods which the OpenX API provides access too which makes it an invaluable tool for virgin developers. By way of example, the class associated with the Campaign object is called CampaignServiceImpl.