The coworking community is a diverse crowd. Every space is different, and their needs in terms of managing it are different. We are working hard to make cobot fit more and more scenarios. On the other hand we have to be careful to keep the interface simple and usable, so we can’t just add everything.
For those who need that extra bit of custom functionality, we’ve added an API early on. It allows any developer to write anything from a small script to a complete application, providing extra functionality, additional user interfaces etc.
While cobot is written using Ruby on Rails, these apps can run on any environment that supports basic HTTP, which covers pretty much any programming language. You can write a PHP script, use Java, another Rails app, or the new hotness node.js.
As an example application we have just released maitre, a small node.js application that makes it easier for a space manager to check in coworkers manually (if you’re not using our Radius module). You can try it out at http://maitre.heroku.com.
Maitre is open source, you can download the source code from github, fork and improve it, or use it as a starting point for your own apps.
If you do write your own cobot application please let us know, so we can tell other spaces about it. If you find that our API doesn’t support a feature you need, also contact us — we can extend it pretty easily.
