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a PHP class to connect to the Tessitura API

9 April 2009 Posted by Michiel

In the process of making the Webbler talk to five different ticketing systems, which all do their thing just that bit different, and at the same keep a bit of sense in the process, I've worked my way into an abstract ticketing plugin for the Webbler, that can be extended for any kind of ticketing system that may be required.

My first aim is to make it work for Tessitura, and therefore, I've started implementing some generic Tessitura API PHP class that will talk to the Tessitura API and pull out the data required, and of course also push in the data retrieved.

The five ticketing systems are:

Tessitura - for the National Theatre (to start with). Their API is quite extensive and very powerful, providing a lot of possibillities.

PatronBase - for the New Wolsey Theatre. The existing API works well and is relatively easy to get into - even better, PB are quite happy to put in all kinds of functionality, when we ask for it, which is excellent. Even the challenge of working through three different time zones (PB mostly in New Zealand; New Wolsey and Tincan Project team in the UK; and Tincan Tech team in Argentina) didn't throw us off course.

AudienceView - for the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. I still need to get a clear view on this one. They seem reluctant to do anything, but who knows, it might get somewhere.

Tickets Dot Com - which we already use for several clients, but we might as well pull into this process. For now the Webbler integrates as well as possible with tickets.com, as  their API is rather limited. Tickets dot com is one of those providers that got lost into branding issues, when they tried to flog their product as all kinds of things like ProVenue, DataBox and whatever else, leaving the world to wonder what it actually is they provide. My hunch is their sales department is bigger than their development deparment. There was this talk a few years back of open sourcing their API and it never happened (or they didn't tell me). I guess all of us (including them) are still trying to figure out what the real (read financial) benefits are of open source. In most cases it will mean, either throw it in the bin or open source it and see what happens. I don't want to go into the amount of lines of code I've written that's gone lost. That should be the topic of another entry. Main thing is, what's worse, open source or bin it.

BOCS - The previous ticketing system in the National Theatre, which the Webbler still happily talks to (in a highly unusual chatter on port 2001), but which seems to have been retired by it's owner,  Galathea STS, in favour of it's other product ENTA. We haven't been involved with any ENTA project, as of now, so I have no idea about that.

It's a shame BOCS never made it any further. I have no idea about the "user" side of it, but the "developer side" was fine, albeit a bit odd. All kinds of values separated by a + or a ' an nothing else. This whole XML and SOAP stuff, it's actually an incredible overhead in communication. Take the Tessitura API. If I get some "yes, it's fine go on" value back, in computing terms often called a "boolean" being "true" or "false", I'll receive <boolean>true</boolean>.

Why not just 1 or 0. that's just as easy. Not only that, it'll take 23 characters less to convey the same information.

BOCS was much clearer about these things in much less data.  But I guess bandwidth and network speeds have taken over. Web 2.0 is all about repeating the same thing all over again, but then with some nice style on it. I hate to think what Web 3.0 or be it 5.0 will look like. Let's pull down the data 50 times before we actually display anything.

As it is, BOCS seems to be on it's way out of existance, but if  you happen to run a BOCS ticketing system in your venue. and you're looking for powerful precense on the internet, then you may be in luck, because the Webbler is probably one of the very few systems in the world that will talk to a BOCS system and sell tickets via the internet.

At the same time, you can of course decide to choose another ticketing system. As it is, the Webbler is fairly happy about any of the ones mentioned above, so you're still quite flexible about the choice to make. The process of making a choice of ticketing system is quite complex and the web element to it, is in many cases not decisive. So we wouldn't want to push anyone trying to decide on a new ticketing system towards any of the five systems we work with. What we have achieved is to build a system on top of any ticketing system you choose that will give you a very powerful web presence and sell your tickets as well. Even if the system of your choice is not listed.

 

 

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