Open Lokad accounts with Lokad.TinyAuth, a tiny REST API

From the beginning, one of our core motto has been: simple integration. Hence, the Forecasting API was the first component to be released.

Recently a few partners requested an easier way to let their user gain access on Lokad services from their web apps.

Indeed, our Forecasting API supports uploading data toward Lokad and downloading forecasts from Lokad, but it does not support opening a Lokad account in the first place.

From the viewpoint of the user of a partnering app, it means that he/she had to go to our registration page, manually register, grab the API key, and finally come back to the originating app to finalize the setup of the forecasting module.

Obviously, there was room for improvement: just get rid of the manual registration step altogether.

Hence, Lokad.TinyAuth was born. This is a tiny REST-style API to either open a Lokad account, or to obtain an API key from an existing Lokad account.

This API is loosely inspired from OAuth; but way simpler (and way less expressive too). Basically, the API comes with the following REST command:

http://app.lokad.com/rest/newacount.ashx?partnerkey={key}&email={email}

which returns an API key associated to the newly created account. Partnering apps can now get their users started with Lokad in seconds.