Hey everyone! This summer we’re going to be releasing the [third version of our API](https://help.wufoo.com/articles/en_US/kb/Wufoo-REST-API-V3/v3/) and we we’re hoping to get your feedback before we call it done. We designed the Wufoo API to help you unlock the potential of the data collected by your Wufoo forms. Our goal behind the API is to provide all the tools and services necessary to help you build applications, advanced reports and visualizations not currently offered by the default Wufoo UI. After spending months working and [integrating with a number of other APIs and services](http://www.wufoo.com/integrations/), we learned a lot of good ideas about how web applications can help programmers, developers and tinkerers not only build, but want to craft new things.

In the hopes of making our API easier and more intuitive to understand, we’ve tried to break the Wufoo API structure up into logical sections, following as closely as we can to [RESTful](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer#RESTful_web_services) web service principles. This means that we’ve organized the Wufoo API into a series of resources represented by URLs and that you interact with these URLs using the HTTP methods of GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE.

One of the great things about using a REST API is that you don’t need any fancy programming tools to view the data and play with it, because all you need is a web browser. If you’re logged into your account, you may browse the resources. Here’s an example of some of the URL formats in the new API. Remember to use the version prefix, so `/users.xml` will be `http://{subdomain}.wufoo.com/api/v3/users.xml`.

/users.xml
/forms.json
/forms/{formId}.xml
/forms/{formId}/fields.xml
/forms/{formId}/entries.xml
/forms/{formId}/entries/{entryId}.xml
/forms/{formId}/entries/count.xml
/reports.xml
/reports/{reportId}.xml
/reports/{reportId}/widgets.xml
/reports/{reportId}/fields.xml
/reports/{reportId}/entries.xml
/reports/{reportId}/entries/count.xml

As you can see, the new API will support both XML and JSON for input and output formats. We’ve also included some [convenient parameters](https://help.wufoo.com/articles/en_US/kb/Wufoo-REST-API-V3/v3/#pretty) to make it easy to visually see the results of the data right in your browser. If you want to easily see the XML or JSON output without a debugger, just add `&pretty=true` to the end of the URL and we’ll escape and indent the data to make it convenient to see right in the browser. It’s really convenient. Here’s an example of what that URL would look like:

https://fishbowl.wufoo.com/api/v3/users.xml&pretty=true

Since REST is not a specification, we used as our guiding light [RESTFul Web Services](http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529260) by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby. Our new REST API is based on the guidelines Richardson and Ruby created for making a Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA). If you want to know more about our specific REST choices and the decisions and justifications we made for following or not following the various ROA concepts, we wrote out a detailed document discussing our process called [The Wufoo REST Principles](https://help.wufoo.com/articles/en_US/kb/Wufoo-REST-API-V3/v3/the-wufoo-rest-principles/).

While the system and documentation is still a work in progress, you can actually start playing with it right now by checking out our [Wufoo REST API documentation](https://help.wufoo.com/articles/en_US/kb/Wufoo-REST-API-V3/v3/). The docs are getting better every day and will eventually be littered with tidbits explaining details of the process and resources to help you dive right in and get working with real data.

Anyway, please do give the new documentation a look, play with your data using the new REST API and tell us what you think. We hope to leave the discussion open for about 2 weeks, then commit to a final design. Thanks and have fun!

**UPDATE :** If you’re playing around with the new REST API, please note that we’ve made some updates and [changes to the Field Structure API](http://www.wufoo.com/2010/05/19/new-rest-api-changes/) results.