Writing just an app, not a "SmartApp"

[kburgoyne (Keith Burgoyne)]

Not entirely sure how to phrase this due to the terminology in use and potentially my misunderstanding of the terminology. I’ve been browsing through the SmartThings developer documentation and it seems like it doesn’t want to talk about writing just a plain old desktop or mobile app. It wants to talk about writing a “SmartApp” which the SmartThings system expects to find at a URL that it can REST call with events, etc. Is it possible to use the SmartThing REST API to write just a plain old UI app that issues calls to the SmartThings REST API to turn on stuff, etc? If so, what is the SmartThings terminology for such an app? One of the obstacles I’m seeing is the talk about using OAuth2, which seems fine for a web app. But often not ideal for a normal app.

[tgauchat (ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)]

The SmartApp way was/is a bit complicated, but it’s now changing: SmartThings new “real” traditional API is now in public Beta. Try it.

Example using new SmartThings Cloud API!

Fellow developers, As many of you know, we recently made some announcements at SDC around the SmartThings Cloud. We’ll be providing more information about this soon, but one thing worth calling out is that the new API (it’s REST!) is already available! While some of the APIs are specific to the new SmartApp model, the /devices and /locations APIs can be used just like any other REST API. All you need is a personal access token, which you can get here. Example CLI Tool [image] To highlight some of the APIs, we wrote a simple CLI tool as an example. It allows you to get information about and control your devices, through a simple Command Line Interface. More importantly, it shows how you might use the API for your own projects. It’s open-sourced, and you can find the repository here. W…

[kburgoyne (Keith Burgoyne)]

Thanks! Now that you’ve routed me back in that direction, I recognize those pages as ones I stumbled into trying to figure out where to start, but lacked enough other pieces to the puzzle to be sure of what I was looking at. The link to getting a personal access token is actually a key piece of the puzzle that explains a lot.