Muzei and Marvel, a powerful pair.

Muzei

Recently Roman Nurik, an Android Developer Advocate at Google, released his live wallpaper app, Muzei (http://muzei.co). Muzei was an instant hit, showing off beautiful design and function. Muzei is as simple as showing a piece of art daily as a wallpaper on your phone. As a bonus Roman made the code for Muzei open source and available on GitHub (https://github.com/romannurik/muzei/). He also encouraged developers to create Muzei extensions to provide additional sources for the images Muzei displays as wallpapers.

Extensions

Almost instantaneously there were extensions available for other image sources Reddit, 500px, Astronomy Picture of the Day, and many more. Wanting to get in on the fun, we at DevelopmentNow were looking to come up with a new source of images to use to build our own Muzei extension.

Marvel API

Around the same time that Muzei was released to the public, Marvel Comics released the Marvel Comics API granting members access to an expansive database of Marvel’s library of 75 years of comics, including over 30,000 comics, 7,000 series, and 5,000 creators. Being cool dudes, Marvel encourages developers to use the new API to create their own Marvel-based apps and digital offerings.

Character of the day

We decided that Marvel’s API and Muzei’s extensibility would make a great duo. Thus, ComicMuzei. Marvel provides great cover and character artwork through it’s API, and we use Muzei to display them beautifully as mobile wallpapers.

Cache Server

We soon realized that if we wanted to make the application public, we would soon max out the 1000 allotted daily api calls that Marvel provides. The solution was to use a cache server that caches the results of a Marvel API request for 24 hours once it has been requested from the client. This avoids any redundant calls to the Marvel API, reducing our overhead greatly.