Tag Archives: General Announcements

Injecting Applications onto Third-Party Webpages Made Easy

Bazaarvoice’s Small Web App Technologies (SWAT) team is pleased to announce that we are open sourcing swat-proxy – a tool to inject applications onto third-party webpages.

In third-party web application development it is difficult to be certain how our applications will look and behave on a client’s webpage until they are implemented. Any number of things could interfere – including other third-party applications! Delivering applications that don’t work can obviously have a severe negative impact on both our clients and us.

One solution is to inject – or proxy – our applications onto the client’s web page. This way we can ensure they work correctly – before they go into production. I wrote swat-proxy to do exactly that, acting as a man-in-the-middle between browser and web server. As the browser requests web pages from the server, swat-proxy intercepts the response and proxies our application into it. The browser renders the web page as if it contained our application all along – exactly simulating the client having implemented it. Now we can be certain how our applications will look and behave.

Other tools exist to accomplish this task, but none are as front-end developer-friendly as swat-proxy: it is written entirely in Javascript – plugging in nicely to our existing workflows – and uses familiar CSS selectors to target DOM elements when injecting content. It is run locally using NodeJS and is very easy to use.

We have found swat-proxy to be incredibly useful when rapidly iterating on prototypes and ensuring the behavior of our applications before they are released to production – we hope you do too! We are releasing it to the larger world as open source, under the Apache 2.0 license. Please download it, try it out, and let us know what you think (in comments below, or as issues or pull requests on Github).

Conversations API Deprecation for Versions 5.2 and 5.3

Today we are announcing an important change to our Conversations API service:

  • On April 30, 2017 service will end for Conversations API versions 5.2 and 5.3

By deprecating older versions of our API service, we can refocus our energies on the current and future API services, which we feel offer the most benefits to our customers. Please visit our Upgrade Guide to learn more about the Conversations API, our API versioning, and the steps necessary to support the upgrade.

We understand that this change will require effort on your part. Bazaarvoice is committed to making this transition easy for you. We are prepared to assist you in a number of ways:

  • Pre-notification: You have more than 12 months to plan for and implement the change.
  • Documentation: We have specific documentation to help you.
  • Support: Our support team is ready to address any questions you may have.
  • Services: Our services teams are available to provide additional assistance.

In summary, on April 30, 2017, Conversations API versions released before 5.4 will no longer be available. Applications and websites using versions before 5.4 will no longer function properly after April 30, 2017. If your custom application or website is making API calls to Conversations API versions 5.2 or 5.3 you will need to upgrade to the current Conversations API (5.4). Applications using Conversations API versions 5.4 and later will continue to receive uninterrupted API service.

If you have any questions about this notice, please submit a case in Spark. We will periodically update this blog and our developer Twitter feed (@BazaarvoiceDev) as we move closer to the change of service date.

Visit the following page Coversations API 2017 Deprecation to learn more.

Thank you for your partnership,
Chris Kauffman
Manager, Product Management