Has anyone ever considered writing a mod to allow the Tapatalk forum client for iOS/Android to be able to communicate with Synch BBSes?

They have an API here:
http://tapatalk.com/api.php

It would be pretty handy to be able to read message boards on my BBS using Tapatalk on my phone. Telnet clients on the phone are a bear to use.

Anyway, seems like a project I might fool around with sometime, but I wondered if anyone else had ever given it a shot.

--Josh

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þ Synchronet

Re: Tapatalk
By: Kirkman to All on Sat Sep 06 2014 16:34:05

Has anyone ever considered writing a mod to allow the Tapatalk forum client for iOS/Android to be able to communicate with Synch BBSes?

They have an API here:
http://tapatalk.com/api.php

Looks like a lot of these calls could be mapped to their closest analogs in Synchronet. It could end up being a big chunk of work to support one app, though. They have PHP plugins for various forum products, but an interface between their API and Synchronet would need to be built mostly from scratch.

Though slower and probably lacking some features of this, I might sooner (and more easily) put together a mobile-friendly web interface. It's been on my list for a while.

Tapatalk on my phone. Telnet clients on the phone are a bear to use.

I'm surprised that people bother with textmode sessions from their phones. I've always found it to be an annoying experience, and either read stuff via a web browser or wait until I've got a real keyboard at my disposal.

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echicken
electronic chicken bbs - bbs.electronicchicken.com - 416-273-7230
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Re: Tapatalk
By: Kirkman to All on Sat Sep 06 2014 04:34 pm

Has anyone ever considered writing a mod to allow the Tapatalk forum client for iOS/Android to be able to communicate with Synch BBSes?

They have an API here:
http://tapatalk.com/api.php

Kirkman, I've been trying to dive into API's recently and I think whatever
you feel like doing you should give it the old college try here are some things I've run into that have stopped me from proceeding with several API's.

When you enter that URL into your browser, it will actually redirect you to an https URL, which is the bulk of the problem I've been running into, because while synchronet can do GET requests over a secure method, it has no POST method for HTTPS as far as I know of. While there are probably ways to work around this, such as maybe creating a proxy with PHP or something, it seems less appealing to me.

Personally I've never tried anything using SOAP (as oppose to REST). I'm not sure if it's easier or harder with Synchronet to work with one or the other, but my research and experience tells me that the REST API is gaining speed, while SOAP is less popular for a reason.

I'd personally like to see an https POST method incorporated into Synchronet if it weren't too much difficulty, or if there's a better method than having to write a php script to interface with an API and then using javascript to interface with that let me know. I pretty much wrote what I think is pretty close to a working twitter library before I discovered that I needed the https POST method to do anything.

With any development, there has to be a demand, need and use for it. Anyhow, I could be wrong and missing something. You can use curl and such to actually make the requests if you're good with that, so I guess it's not a huge deal if you can handle it. I don't know if it will work well when switching between Linux/Windows etc though. It's not my forte and personally, I'd rather have something in https to use. If I had to make one feature request, that'd be it. Eventually I'll get better with curl if I need to. Having it in the module is much more in line with my thought process.

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Re: Tapatalk
By: LaRRy LaGoMoRpH to Kirkman on Sun Sep 07 2014 19:55:01

When you enter that URL into your browser, it will actually redirect you to an https URL, which is the bulk of the problem I've been running into, because while synchronet can do GET requests over a secure method, it has no POST method for HTTPS as far as I know of. While there are probably ways to work around this, such as maybe creating a proxy with PHP or something, it seems less appealing to me.

In the case of this Tapatalk API, Synchronet's http.js (and its limitations) don't come into play. The API calls that they list need to be available on the forum that their app attempts to access. Basically this would mean an SSJS script (or several) on your Synchronet webserver, handling the various types of queries that would come in from this app.

Now, whether the app insists on only talking to forums via HTTPS is another thing that would need to be considered. Then it could become a question of enabling that on your webserver in one way or another (Deuce has done some work on this recently, you could probably also use stunnel or similar.)

Personally I've never tried anything using SOAP (as oppose to REST). I'm

I believe they use XML-RPC, which is similar but not the same as SOAP IIRC. Crafting the responses their app would want to see might require some external library, or messing around with E4X assuming we still have that available to us.

With any development, there has to be a demand, need and use for it.

That's the main reason I'm unlikely to work on this myself. I don't use this app and wonder how many people around here do. (However if I were a user and fan of it, I might be more interested. So I'm going to try it out.)

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echicken
electronic chicken bbs - bbs.electronicchicken.com - 416-273-7230
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Re: Tapatalk
By: echicken to LaRRy LaGoMoRpH on Sun Sep 07 2014 04:16 pm

That's the main reason I'm unlikely to work on this myself. I don't use this app and wonder how many people around here do. (However if I were a user and fan of it, I might be more interested. So I'm going to try it out.)

I think it's a pretty good app for browsing phpBB-style forums. I suspect (though I don't have stats to back this up) that it is the dominant app of its type, and it has extensions to interface with a wide variety of forum software.

I didn't use it for a long time (I was turned off by the nagging "Install tapatalk" messages that seemed to pop up on almost every forum I visited on my phone). But using forums on a phone is often a royal pain, because of their table-based layouts. I finally broke down and installed Tapatalk, and was pleasantly surprised by it.

It's a nice app, with a clean interface, and some helpful options. I like that I can add loads of forums to it, and keep track of them all in one place. That's what made me think it might be a nice way to keep track of my BBS conversations while I'm on the go.

Anyway, I will probably experiment with the API in coming weeks just for my
own curioisity and to try to learn how to do it. I don't know that I'll
build anything worth releasing, but we'll see.

--Josh

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BiC -=- http://breakintochat.com -=- bbs wiki and blog


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þ Synchronet

Re: Tapatalk
By: LaRRy LaGoMoRpH to Kirkman on Sun Sep 07 2014 19:55:01

When you enter that URL into your browser, it will actually redirect you to an https URL, which is the bulk of the problem I've been
running into, because while synchronet can do GET requests over a secure method, it has no POST method for HTTPS as far as I know of. While there are probably ways to work around this, such as maybe creating a proxy with PHP or something, it seems less appealing to me.

Now, whether the app insists on only talking to forums via HTTPS is
another thing that would need to be considered. Then it could become a question of enabling that on your webserver in one way or another (Deuce has done some work on this recently, you could probably also use stunnel
or similar.)

I am far far faaaarrrr from being a coder. But I was trying to see if there were any solutions to have an HTTPS version of sbbs running on port 443
without learning to program it from the ground up (in which case I would be squarely out of my league). I was also looking to see if it would be possible to do stuff like POP3S (995), MAP over SSL (993) and SMTPS (465). I did eventually run into something called Nginx (pronounced engine-x).

While it looked interesting, it is still well above my technical skills to figure out a way to put it to use. However, someone more code minded might
want to check it out to see what it can do: http://wiki.nginx.org/Main

~KenDB3

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Re: Re: Tapatalk
By: KenDB3 to echicken on Thu Sep 11 2014 23:02:30

While it looked interesting, it is still well above my technical skills to figure out a way to put it to use. However, someone more code minded might want to check it out to see what it can do: http://wiki.nginx.org/Main

I've used it a fair bit. It works well, and there are alternatives that others prefer (can't think of the names off of the top of my head at this late hour.)

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echicken
electronic chicken bbs - bbs.electronicchicken.com - 416-273-7230
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