The Premix Python wrapper for the Best Buy Remix API

Posted by Keith

February 27, 2009

Thomas Bohmbach and Premix

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One of our goals here with the Best Buy Remix API is to help facilitate and grow community. Being a young API we feel that our community is growing quite well and we take pride in the interactions we have with the public and our developers. Today, I was able to have a conversation with incredibly talented developer and technologist Thomas Bohmbach. Thomas ha written a Python wrapper for the Remix API called Premix. Enjoy the conversation:

Q1) First off Thomas, tell us a bit about yourself and your interests in technology.

A1) I’ve been programming since my parents bought me my first computer (an Atari 1200XL) when I was in 7th grade. I published my first “open source” program in 1988 and was even paid for it by Antic Magazine. Since then I’ve done a lot of different programming, from high-end digital camera software to writing a high-volume service oriented architecture for a large health insurance company. This year, I started my own technology consulting company, Gumption LLC, and have been lucky enough to work with Best Buy during that time on their Giftag project.

Q2)Thomas, I see that you have written a python wrapper for the Remix API called Premix. Could you tell us a bit about that?

A2) When we started using the Best Buy Remix web services in Giftag, it became clear that we needed a way to easily build up Remix query URLs programmatically in python and simplify the parsing of the returned data. Rather than keep all that code inside of Giftag, we created the open-source Premix project instead and released it under the Apache 2 License.

Q3) Premix is obviously something you would like to share with other developers. How does this add functionality to the current Remix API?

A3) Technically it doesn’t add any functionality to the existing Remix REST API, it simply makes it easier for python developers (including Google App Engine developers) to use them. The main focus was to make the APIs more “pythonic” and to borrow heavily from the GAE BigTable APIs. The idea is that if you’re using Premix, you shouldn’t even have to know that there’s a RESTful web service behind it all. To a python developer, it’s all simple objects and method calls.

Q4) I am always interested in what motivates developers to create on open platforms. What drives you?

A4) I think the main thing that drives me to open up as much of my code as I can is that I want what I create to be useful to others. If code isn’t openly available, right away there is a barrier to usefulness. Oh, and there’s probably some ego stroking in there as well

Q5) Thomas, I see that you have posted public information about Premix. How could developers get more information and possibly collaborate?

A5) The main jumping off page for the Premix project is on The Gumption Blog. If you have general comments, you can make them there. However, the project itself (code, documentation, issue tracker, etc.) is hosted at BitBucket, which is a social coding site. From there a developer can download the source code, browse the documentation on the wiki (which I spent a lot of time writing , create a bug/enhancement report, submit a patch, or subscribe to and track all changes on the project. All help is welcome! Even if a developer doesn’t intend to use Premix, I highly recommend they check out BitBucket. It has saved me a lot of time and headaches over trying to set up my own site.

We thank Thomas for sitting down with us! This is what community and open source is all about. Please feel free to leave any comments and suggestions here in the comments.