The BUGswarm API can be broken down into two primary actions, configuration and participation. Configuration includes the creation, updating, and destruction of swarms and their resources in addition to inviting other users' resources into your swarms and accepting or rejecting pending invitations. Participation includes producing and consuming data within one or many swarms.
BUGswarm uses a RESTful (Representational State Transfer) API to configure swarms and their resources. Use it to create and destroy swarms and resources, add and remove resources to and from swarms, and generate API keys. In addition to these methods, the Configuration API also takes care of the social aspect of BUGswarm, sending invitations to other users' resources to join your swarms as well as accepting and rejecting pending invitations. To make development easier, the Configuration API has been wrapped up in BUGswarm Tools, a set of python scripts used to make the development process simple and easy.
BUGswarm makes use of an HTTP streaming API to allow resources to connect to and participate in the swarms they are members of. Because the Participation API uses streaming, after connecting a resource to a swarm, the connection remains open while bidirectional HTTP requests are processed. To make development easier, the Participation API has also been wrapped up in BUGswarm Tools . Use the `consume.py` and `produce.py` scripts for use the Participation API from the command line.
In order to make the BUGswarm development process as easy and friendly as possible, we have developed a set of tools and libraries to help you get started even faster. Visit the Tools and Libraries pages to learn more.