As we’ve been working on the API for Snapshot we realised that there’s a bunch of cool aspects to the API which we think that everyone can benefit from.

To this end we at TheFARM have decided that we’re going to give away the CMS API’s for Snapshot free!

What does this include?

What we’re providing is a set of API’s which can be used as replacements for some of the Umbraco API’s, most importantly the Media and NodeFactory API’s.

In Snapshot we’ve got quite a bit of caching built in for working with both media and node, along with some handy features around the creation of strongly typed representations of your objects, similar to LINQ to Umbraco, but not tied to Umbraco 4.1 and more focused on being used in the scope of NodeFactory.

What’s not included?

This is just the Snapshot API for working with the Umbraco XML cache, it does not include the Snapshot export engine, nor does it include the API for working in the published Snapshot environment (sorry, those aren’t going to be free!).

Why would I want to use it?

Well this is a good question, we’ve already got both Media and NodeFactory, why would you want to use something more custom for it?

Media caching is an obvious advantage, but most importantly the Snapshot API is designed with dependency injection as a forethought. This means that when you’re working on your applications in Umbraco you can have the Media or Node API’s injected using Autofac. This makes testable Umbraco development quite easy.

Lastly, since Snapshot is an abstraction away from the Umbraco API you can even write your own implementations which don’t require the Umbraoc XML file to read data, you could pull it in from any source.

Getting it

The pre-release of the Snapshot CMS API is available on the Snapshot page of FarmCode.org. Keep in mind that this is an early build of the Snapshot CMS API, and it is subject to change. For updated releases keep an eye on our blog.