This entire service from Sculpteo revolves around a Cloud Engine that allows users to integrate Scupteo’s website features onto their own sites. API functionality needs to be as versatile as the various kinds of groups who would like to link to Sculpteo’s features: 3D printing user groups, marketplaces, designers, and other businesses and services. For example:
“Let’s say that you’ve invented a 3D scanning or 3D modeling app, and you’d like all the designs you created to be directly uploaded on your Sculpteo’s account. We have an API for that; use our ‘Upload API’ it has two different modes, namely the direct upload and the web to web upload. If you’ve created your own marketplace and you’d like to integrate galleries and 3D previews of the designs in your library, we have an API for that, our ‘Display APIs’ were created for this purpose.”
Get the idea? Beginning on March 1, 2016, Sculpteo’s API test platform allows you to directly copy and paste the programming code displayed on the test platform into your own HTML page code. Just to give you an idea of how this copying and pasting of code works: have you ever wanted to put a YouTube video up on your own website or blog? On the page, you click on the arrow under the video that reads “Share” and you scroll down to “Embed” right beneath it. You copy that code (all those seemingly jumbled numbers,letters, etc.) onto your website and presto! Your video will appear there. If you use WordPress, for example, you would switch from the “Visual” tab to the “Text” tab and then copy the code where you want the video to appear. When you switch back to the “Visual” tab — you will see the video there. It’s really quite simple. We’ve come a long way from those expert coding days that kept many of us less coding-inclined people from having our own awesome websites. (If I understand this, then you can too!)
There are certainly more details depending on which API you are interested in using, but a quick look at the test platform shows you how it works in a few clicks. And Sculpteo offers incentives for you to check out and learn the new API test platform as well:
“By coupling a display API with our affiliation program you’ll earn 7% of sales on our website coming from your website.
By becoming our partner and using our Order API, you’ll be able to generate your own customized packing slip to ship the parcels directly to the customer reducing the shipping costs. You’ll also save time because order will be automatically made and as far as you generate a high-volume of sales, you can save money up to 20% of sales price.”
As Sculpteo reassures its current and future users: “Don’t worry, be API.” Discuss in the 3D API forum over at 3DPB.com.