Wolfram Alpha’s full power unleashed with its new API

Wolfram Alpha, the popular computational knowledge engine containing a wealth of information, factoids and insight about a vast range of topics, has now released its API version 2.0 to developers, bringing open access and enhanced features.

Wolfram Alpha’s API (application programming interface) 2.0 gives developers more access from numerous types of applications. With the new API, developers can integrate its results into a web and desktop applications, enterprise and mobile apps, websites along with ePublishing and cloud-computing applications.

Its latest release contains an improved asynchronous operation that brings the end-user a quicker experience, by throwing early returns ahead of the more time-consuming ones. It additionally includes full access to its Java language client library and technical features such as “simplified licensing that makes it free for personal use and allows significantly greater flexibility for commercial deployment.”

With the launch of Version 2.0 of the Wolfram Alpha API, we’re opening the power of Wolfram Alpha to all developers, big and small, as we continue our push toward making Wolfram Alpha the place for facts on the net.. – Wolfram|Alpha’s Schoeller Porter, Architect, Developer Relations.

Back in 2009, Wolfram Alpha’s API was integrated with Microsoft’s decision engine Bing to elevate the results when a user searched topics such as nutrition, health and advanced mathematics. Touch Press also used Wolfram’s API within The Elements and Solar System, two ebooks that use links of each page that connect to information on Wolfram’s engine. Wolfram Alpha additionally has its own mobile applications that were initially released for $50 at the app store in 2009. Since then, the price has been reduced to $1.99.

As Programmable Web pointed out, the rate limits are a tad stringent, causing issues for applications that are requesting a high number of calls from its API. And while there is a free non-commercial account available for developers, the maximum amount of calls per month is 2,000.