Programmatic access to Tavultesoft’s keyboard catalogue

For those of you with a web programming bent, the following may be of interest.  We now have 2 APIs available for accessing the Keyman Desktop and KeymanWeb keyboard catalogues.  Both APIs are RESTful and return UTF-8 JSON format data only in their initial incarnation.

Update 18 Dec 2019: These APIs are no longer available. Visit https://help.keyman.com/developer/cloud/ for replacement APIs.

Updated 25 Jun 2012: Please note the minor changes to the format returned from the V1.0 API below.

KeymanWeb Keyboards

This would provide links to web-based keyboards that allow you to type the language directly into a field in the browser without any need to install any software, hosted on our site www.keymanweb.com.  The KeymanWeb API is documented at http://help.keymanweb.com/dev/webapi.php.  The only other piece you need for this puzzle is the link to the live KeymanWeb keyboard, which can be generated using the language id and the keyboard id as follows:
http://www.keymanweb.com/go/language/keyboard/notepad

So example, to link to the Egyptian Hieroglyphic keyboard, you would link to
http://www.keymanweb.com/go/egy/hieroglyphic/notepad

Keyman Desktop Keyboards

This API is similar to the KeymanWeb API.  Basically, you can access the full list of keyboards, grouped by language, by calling the following URI:
http://www.tavultesoft.com/api/1.0/languages

Update 18 Dec 2019: This APIs is no longer available. Visit https://help.keyman.com/developer/cloud/ for replacement APIs.

Updated 25 Jun 2012: The API has had a minor update: keyboard values are now normalised to reduce the size of the response.  This minor change was made because the API was still fresh and we wanted to fix this before it became ingrained; don’t worry, we won’t be fiddling with the structure in breaking ways like this in the future!  We also added the description member to keyboard data (this, however, is a non-breaking change).

The response for the query for all language information will be similar to the following:

{
“languages”:[
  {
   “name”:”Lao”,
   “id”:”lao”,
   “country”:”LA”,
   “uri”:”http://keymankeyboards.com/?q=l:iso:lao”,
   “keyboards”:[443,472,442,431,315,304]
  },
  …
],
“keyboards”:[
      {
         “name”:”Lao 2008″,
         “id”:443,
         “uri”:”http://keymankeyboards.com/443″,
         “version”:”1.0.2″,
         “lastModified”:”2009-06-22 17:12:38.083″,
         “description”:”a keyboard description …”
      },
      {
         “name”:”Lao Basic”,
         “id”:472,
         “uri”:”http://keymankeyboards.com/472″,
         “version”:”1.0″,
         “lastModified”:”2009-05-15 16:18:56.430″,
         “description”:”a keyboard description …”
      },
      {
         “name”:”Lao Script for Windows”,
         “id”:442,
         “uri”:”http://keymankeyboards.com/442″,
         “version”:””,
         “lastModified”:”2008-08-29 15:45:12.597″,
         “description”:”a keyboard description …”
      },
      {
         “name”:”Lao Unicode on Thai Keyboard layout”,
         “id”:431,
         “uri”:”http://keymankeyboards.com/431″,
         “version”:”1.1″,
         “lastModified”:”2008-03-24 21:17:19.230″,
         “description”:”a keyboard description …”
      },
      {
         “name”:”Enhanced Lao (non-Unicode)”,
         “id”:315,
         “uri”:”http://keymankeyboards.com/315″,
         “version”:”1.1″,
         “lastModified”:”2012-02-07 10:43:41.633″,
         “description”:”a keyboard description …”
      },
      {
         “name”:”Simple Lao (non-Unicode)”,
         “id”:304,
         “uri”:”http://keymankeyboards.com/304″,
         “version”:”1.0″,
         “lastModified”:”2009-05-15 16:53:21.010″,
         “description”:”a keyboard description …”
      },
      …
 ]}

Updated 25 Jun 2012: You can retrieve a single language record by appending the language code, e.g. http://www.tavultesoft.com/api/1.0/languages/lao.  When a single language is queried in this way, the return value folds the keyboards array in as per the example below for Lao.

{
   “name”:”Lao”,
   “id”:”lao”,
   “country”:”LA”,
   “uri”:”http://keymankeyboards.com/?q=l:iso:lao”,
   “keyboards”:[
      {
         “name”:”Lao 2008″,
         “id”:443,
         “uri”:”http://keymankeyboards.com/443″,
         “version”:”1.0.2″,
         “lastModified”:”2009-06-22 17:12:38.083″
      },
      {
         “name”:”Lao Basic”,
         “id”:472,
         “uri”:”http://keymankeyboards.com/472″,
         “version”:”1.0″,
         “lastModified”:”2009-05-15 16:18:56.430″
      },
      {
         “name”:”Lao Script for Windows”,
         “id”:442,
         “uri”:”http://keymankeyboards.com/442″,
         “version”:””,
         “lastModified”:”2008-08-29 15:45:12.597″
      },
      {
         “name”:”Lao Unicode on Thai Keyboard layout”,
         “id”:431,
         “uri”:”http://keymankeyboards.com/431″,
         “version”:”1.1″,
         “lastModified”:”2008-03-24 21:17:19.230″
      },
      {
         “name”:”Enhanced Lao (non-Unicode)”,
         “id”:315,
         “uri”:”http://keymankeyboards.com/315″,
         “version”:”1.1″,
         “lastModified”:”2012-02-07 10:43:41.633″
      },
      {
         “name”:”Simple Lao (non-Unicode)”,
         “id”:304,
         “uri”:”http://keymankeyboards.com/304″,
         “version”:”1.0″,
         “lastModified”:”2009-05-15 16:53:21.010″
      }
   ]
}