March 8, 2014 archive

Are you an application developer who makes queries to DNS somewhere inside your application?

If so… or if you aren’t, but are just looking for a reason to play around with some code… there’s a new “getdns” API out that is designed to make it easier to interact with DNS.  From the website:

getdns is a modern asynchronous DNS API. It implements DNS entry points from a design developed and vetted by application developers, in an API specification edited by Paul Hoffman. With the development of this API, we intend to offer application developers a modernized and flexible way to access DNS security (DNSSEC) and other powerful new DNS features; a particular hope is to inspire application developers towards innovative security solutions in their applications.

You can read more about it at:

http://getdnsapi.net/

And the code is available on Github at:

https://github.com/getdnsapi/getdns

There are also bindings for python and node.js in the works. This new “getdns” API has been developed by a team of developers from NLnet Labs, Verisign Labs and No Mountain Software and is based off of the getdns API specification documented by Paul Hoffman.

Members of the team gave a presentation at IETF 89 whose slides you can view about this new API and what you can do with it.  While  I haven’t played with it myself yet, I’m pleased to see that one major point is that it provides developers with easy usage of DNSSEC.  All in all it’s very cool to see a new API out there and we do encourage people to check it out and see what you think of it.  I’d note that because the code is maintained at Github, you can file issues there if you have questions or bugs.  There is also an email list for developers and users who want to get more involved with the project.

Congrats to the developer team for releasing this new API and we hope that it enables  app developers to more easily interact with DNS and DNSSEC!