You can now access Cambridge Dictionaries Online using Python and Ruby dictionary API wrappers, so now you can bring Cambridge's English language dictionaries into your Django and Rails site.
We've also brought all our wrappers into one API Developer Resources page on this site, along with samples. You can also find other things there like the DTD for the dictionary XML, and sample CSS for styling the dictionary entries.
You'll notice our wrappers are free and open-source, provided under the terms of a 3-clause BSD license, i.e. you can use, modify and share them, provided you keep the same license.
What's a wrapper? What's a binding?
A wrapper, sometimes known as a binding, is a piece of code written in a particular language to allow other code in that language to access some other service more easily. So for example, instead of writing code to fetch data from the URLs directly, the wrapper handles all the fiddly escaping, and provides the methods in a way which is appropriate for that language. You just need to invoke the object, pointing it to CDO and giving your access key, then you can call the methods of that object (e.g. api.search("british", "slate")
).
What's a DTD?
The Document Type Definition or DTD is a simple machine-readable description of the elements and attributes that are allowed or required in an XML document. We have also written human-friendly comments throughout the DTD explaining the roles of the elements. We aim to keep all our entries in line with this DTD.
What else have we been doing?
If you haven't noticed already, we've been doing some documentation fixes and we made the API specification cleaner and much easier to read.
We've also fixed a small bug in the HTML output - you should have got an email about this earlier in the month if you're registered to get an API key.
Let us know in the comments box below if you've got any problems with the wrappers or the documentation.