application-developmentpythonsoftware-center
As an app author, I would like to promote my app in Ubuntu. One nice way to do it is to encourage users to submit their reviews and ratings to the Software Center.
It would be really cool if I could just add a 'Submit review' button in the About dialog of my app to make it extremely easy to write and submit a review.
Is there a Software Center ratings and reviews API that I can access through Python to achieve that?
Ratings and reviews have now landed in the current development release of 11.04.
Keep in mind that, normally, no major updates are performed within one release. In almost every case, updates are "Stable Release Updates" (SRUs). But see the second part for what will hopefully be an exception in February. :)
(Image by omgubuntu)
Software-Center's Launchpad Project 
page also has instructions on how to try the latest development version, if you want to check out what's currently going on:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:software-store-developers/daily-build
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
This is experimental, unreleased software. If you do decide to try it out, and you encounter a problem, Report a Bug - after making sure it hasn't been reported already.
The ubuntu software centre in Maverick will get ratings and reviews in February 2011, according to it's page in the Ubuntu Wiki
We plan to release Ubuntu Software Center 3.2 for Ubuntu 10.10, with one new feature:
- Rating and reviewing software, and seeing ratings and reviews submitted by other Ubuntu users.
Many thanks to @NES for keeping us up to date on it!
Well, yes. Keep in mind that
https://software-center.ubuntu.com/api/2.0/applications/$LANG/ubuntu/$SERIES/$ARCH/
will return a JSON document detailing third party applications currently installable for a given language code, release name prefix, and architecture. For example, here are the Software Center items currently provided for Ubuntu 12.04.
For technical reasons that would be constitutionally painful to explain, applications available from the Ubuntu archives (eg the Universe) are handled by a data package: app-install-data. You can get the list with apt-get source -t $SERIES app-install-data and handle it on your server locally; it doesn't change very often.
http://reviews.ubuntu.com/reviews/api/1.0/reviews/filter/$LANG/ubuntu/$SERIES/$VERSION/$PACKAGE/
Will get you reviews for a package. Note that most fields here can be replaced with any. For example, here are reviews of Warsaw written for 11.10.
http://reviews.ubuntu.com/reviews/api/1.0/review-stats/ubuntu/$SERIES/
Will get you all ratings for all packages.
http://screenshots.ubuntu.com/thumbnail-with-version/$PACKAGE/$VERSION
http://screenshots.ubuntu.com/screenshot-with-version/$PACKAGE/$VERSION
Will get you the thumbnail and screenshot for an application. For example, here is VLC's latest screenshot.
/usr/share/software-center/softwarecenter/distro/Ubuntu.py
/usr/share/software-center/softwarecenter/backend/piston/
For more API fun, visit these paths in your file browser. It's all in very readable Python. There's a lot of miscellanea for things like pagination, filtering, licensing text, review statistics, etcetera that you might be interested in:
Best Answer
Ubuntu Software Center can be launched with a package name:
which displays the 'Write your own review' action, but you usually have to scroll to see it.
If you'd like to be able to display your own review form and submit via the ratings and reviews API, you can do so with the
submit_reviewAPI call, but it'll require an authenticated API call... see "Making authenticated API calls" at:http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~rnr-developers/rnr-server/rnrclient/view/head:/doc/quickstart.rst