We are always looking towards the future trying to keep the MAGICapp platform as modern as possible. 

Through years of experience we have come up with ways to keep data in a highly structured format while being able to quickly and easily transfo rm to any format for exchange with other systems.  Since we believe you data is your data, and we want to make guideline writing as easy as possible we provide an API to both read and write guidelines.  

Some info about the various formats we support.

JSON - It’s good for software clients.  Backend systems can easily parse as well.  It’s much lighter weight than XML and also human readable.  Currently our public API are RESTful services that speak JSON. 

This is pretty much the standard among all the major internet players. We are currently looking into changing to JSON for linked data: http://json-ld.org/

XML - It’s good for backend systems.  Software clients have a difficult time parsing it.  It’s best used when you must be able to validate a document for correctness in structure.  Even though XML is slowly losing some of it’s usefulness to format like JSON and YAML we still support it.  Currently we have no web services that render their output in XML.  Any of our API calls that return JSON could easily be modified to return the same structure as XML.

PDF - It’s good for humans.  Almost every device out there from a server to a cell phone can view them.  MAGICapp can render guidelines as PDF for offline reading.  We use a HTML to PDF conversion process which allows for the possibility of custom formatting.

RDF - Much like XML but with entity–relationships.  It’s on our radar and we’re excited to start experimenting with it.

If you require one of our API calls to support a format that we haven’t implemented yet please contact Linn Brandt.