Welcome to Zamples

Zamples enables interactive online software documentation that integrates community features with executable live code examples. Traditionally, programmers read static documentation, download zip files containing sample code and visit separate discussion groups for support. This is a slow process, with many opportunities for failure.

We believe that the way to accelerate the use of computer languages and the deployment of software platforms API is to enable programmers to quickly find relevant code examples and play with them. Zamples makes it easy because the configuration, compilation and execution all happen on a server, so the programmer doesn't need to install any software in order to play with sample code. Programmers no longer need to waste time searching for and configurating sample code to learn how to use an API.

Zamples offers a unique solution for vendors of software platforms, development tools and programming education content.

Zamples Value for Software Platform Vendors

Software platform vendors can use Zamples to enhance their developer networks by cost-effectively providing the code examples that their developer community needs. Vendors that use Zamples can accelerate market acceptance for new products and augmenting sales and service opportunities. What's more, Zamples reduces technical support costs and increases responsiveness while providing greater visibility into product and customer issues.

Unlike conventional static documentation with downloadable zip files containing sample code and separate discussion groups, Zamples can dramatically increase revenues and reduce costs by:

Driving sales by making channel partners and end user customers more productive when customizing and integrating software platforms.
Improving process and content of the vendor's technical support site through Business Intelligence that provides visibility into the use of content and examples.
Lowering the cost of providing superior customer support for the complex task of utilizing APIs.
Increasing sales through additional cross-sell and upsell opportunities identified by Zamples' Business Intelligence.
Adding another tier of support to existing offerings. Zamples offers workflow to for escalation of problems from channel partners and an end user's development team into the vendor's technical support team.

Embedding Zamples into an existing product and support offerings is straightforward. The server can be hosted on a developer support extranet, or at our facility, and can easily integrated with an existing support offering.

Educational Content Vendors

Online magazines and book publishers often publish code examples. Zamples-powered online articles and books can be written in an more engaging and personal style, where users can immediately try out what the author is teaching - without leaving the page. People learn by doing, and retain more after trying something for themselves. The result is happy readers, and much less work for authors, editors and technical reviewers who otherwise spend a lot of time trying to get their sample code to work.

Corporate Web Services

An increasing number of business services are exposed as web services. Zamples provides a wonderful means for learning how to develop programs that utilize these web services because programmers can easily try out sample programs that exercise web service APIs with Zamples. See for yourself - try the Zamples-powered Google Web Services APIs.

IDE Manufacturers

Integrated development environments all have integrated help capability. The "super-Javadocs" that Zamples provides greatly increases an IDE user's productivity. IDEs with the Zamples plug-in promote rapid code discovery and reuse by cut and paste, which leads to a compelling user experience.

The Developer Community Likes Zamples

Zamples meets the ever-increasing need of programmers to learn and use large and diverse APIs that constantly change. Zamples provides a comprehensive repository infrastructure for live code examples that can discovered via an easy-to-use search mechanism and are delivered into the programmer's preferred development environment. By 'live code', we mean short code fragments that can be compiled, executed and edited on line. We further save programmers productivity by anchoring developer community discussions to specific code samples. Programmers like Zamples' features:

A comprehensive repository infrastructure with optional high quality working code fragments that shows how methods in an API work.
An optional execution module that compiles and executes the code fragments in a secure environment online, without the end user needing to install any software. This allows developers to test these codes remotely with an controlled environment.
Search and delivery mechanisms to allow the appropriate code fragment(s) to be discovered and presented to the programmer for him/her to experiment with.
Programmers that access Zamples' online repository of live code examples can search for and play with 'how-to' examples without installing any software.