Hi,
I'm looking forward to the conference this year and all of the Next Gen goodness that I'm sure will be coming, however I was wondering if anyone has much information available at the moment.
We have found some money in our budget to redesign our entire website, and the project is going to kick off in the next couple of months. At the previous conference it was mentioned that more of the Tessitura functionality we be accesiable through the WebAPI, so my question is this. Are we better planning our website to work with v10 of the WebAPI or should we wait for v11? Basically, how much extra functioanlity is it going to introduce if any?
Thanks
Dave and Simon—great question and response here. Overall, Version 11 of Tessitura – the first version to use NextGen technology – will focus on new functionality for managing constituents and constituent relationships. At the same time, we are beginning to incorporate a new set of REST services that support constituents and constituent relationships. These web methods will be used by the client application and also be available for use on your websites.
So what’s changing in terms of the web with V11? Not much if you choose to use the existing API. As we have said in the past, we will continue to support the existing SOAP API as long as is feasible, so there will be a Version 11 SOAP API that looks and acts nearly identically as the V10 API. However, in Version 11 there will now be the addition of the new REST services layer which you can optionally choose to take advantage of should you wish to utilize the new constituent functionality it introduces. To be clear, your website can be coded to point to both the current SOAP API and new REST API concurrently. This new services layer (debuting with V11) will continue to expand functionally in future versions, exposing more and more next gen functionality as it’s released.
So to address your question directly, if your current redesign goals include anything relating to constituent handling, you may want to see what comes out in V11 before proceeding with coding to V10. Note that we will be releasing a Sandbox specifically for web developers in the next month or so that will allow you and others to test drive the new REST methods well in advance of needing to use them in production. If you are interested in getting on the list for the developer Sandbox just let Andrew Recinos know, and he’ll take it from there (arecinos@tessituranetwork.com).
Overall, when you choose to point to the new API is, as Dave says well below, a matter of deciding if you’ll wait or start incorporating next gen enabled functionality iteratively. This is largely dependent on your own functionality requirements and technology strategy for the web.
Hope this helps! Contact me any time with questions.
Kristin